The Fungal Pioneer: A Life Exhibition

On an early summer day of 1876 near Druid Hill Park in Baltimore, a middle-aged woman carrying three large, corrupt mushrooms repelled fellow travelers in horse-drawn carriages.

Even wrapped in paper, the foul smell of the aptly named Stinkhorn mushroom was overwhelming, but the woman suffocated her laughter as two other passengers griped about the surrounding flies. The smell didn’t bother her. All she cared about was to bring specimens home to study them, she would write later.

This is Mary Elizabeth Banning, a self-taught mycologist who has been doing creative research into Maryland fungi for nearly 40 years.

Miss Bunning characterized thousands of specimens she found in the countryside of Baltimore and its surrounding areas, identifying 23 new species in science at the time.

The talented artist has collected these observations into a manuscript called “Maryland Fungi.” It consisted of 175 stunning watercolor paintings, each with an accurate yet intimate portrait of a particular species, as well as detailed scientific explanations and anecdotes about the collection of mushrooms.

The manuscript was Miss Bunning’s life work, and she wanted to see it published. But it ended in the drawers of the New York State Museum in Albany and has been forgotten for almost a century.

Her watercolors make up the backbone Exhibition at the museum It will open this month and will run until January 4th next year. The exhibition, called “Outcasts,” recognizes not only the museum’s Mycology collection, but also the museum’s Mycology Collection, as well as the museum’s Mycology Collection.

Miss Banning is known as the fungus “vegetable exile.” At the time (and throughout 1969) fungi were classified as distinctive plants. Most botanists From the mid-19th century, their research was considered a backwater of research.

It was the exile who banned herself. “She was very much hoping to be part of the science community,” said John Haynes, a museum’s mycology curator until she retired in 2005 and a wide-ranging study of her history. But as a woman living in the 19th century, the path was largely closed to her.

Like her contemporaries like Beatrix Potter, she tried to make her mark in the emerging field of mycology.

One scientist gave her Charles Horton Peck, who worked at the museum as New York’s first national botanist from 1868 to 1913. A prominent American mycologic man, Peck has dedicated most of his career to fungi, gathering over 33,000 specimens in a New York survey, surpassing 2,700 New New Kachiuk reports.

“A lot of the fungi that people recognize from New York and the northeast are what Peck explained,” said Dr. Kaisian.

Miss Banning first wrote Mr. Peck in 1878, seeking feedback on her manuscript. Unlike the other scientists she tried to contact, he wrote back and they responded for nearly 20 years. Her letters are part of which are on display, providing a window into their relationship.

“You are my only friend on the debate land of the Official Gazette,” she wrote to him in 1879. She recorded her collection forays and scientific observations, and conveyed her dreams of the manuscript. “I have a strong will,” she wrote in 1889.

Miss Banning’s letters were often whimsical and passionate. None of Mr. Peck’s letters to her remained, but his tone in the other letters suggested he was much more restrained. Nevertheless, he treated Miss Vanning like a respected colleague – providing her scientific guidance, an account of the species with her support, and even an account of the species named after her. Their scientific bonds could not be denied.

“It’s a love story, but not between them. They both were in love with fungi,” Haynes said. The play he wrote about their relationship from Miss Bunning’s letter will take place at the exhibition’s gallery opening event on April 4th at the museum.

However, the love triangle tends to change particularly sourly. With no visible publishing prospects for her own, Miss Bunning sent her manuscript to Mr. Peck in 1890, hoping that he could publish it. “He would have had the resources to make it a permanent part of the mycologic record,” Dr. Kaisian said. But he never did.

She expressed how difficult it was to let go of her job and asked her to reassure her that she appreciated her contribution to the field, but she was not received that recognition. “In her letter, she seems to have passed away without really understanding the legacy, the value of her work,” Dr. Kaisian said.

In one of her final letters to Mr. Peck in 1897, six years before her death, Miss Bunning lamented the loss of the book as she fell into poverty alone in a room home in Virginia. “I hardly know that I’ve given up on an illustrated book,” she wrote. “To tell you the truth, I want to look at it and call it my own again, but this is by no means.”

“It still brings tears to my eyes,” Dr. Haynes said.

It was originally Dr. Haynes who revealed the manuscript of Miss Bunning.

The eccentric curator showed it to him in 1969 when he visited the museum for a job interview. He recalls being surprised by the colors that were beautifully preserved by the fact that pages had not been opened to sunlight for decades.

He exhibited some of the paintings in 1981, and they were on display several more times, including the birth of Miss Banenning, including Talbot County, Maryland. With the help of this spotlight, Miss Bunning was led to the Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame in 1994. However, since the mid-1990s, the photographs were packed in as pigments decompose quickly in light.

Beyond Miss Bunning’s work, “Outcasts” gives visitors a glimpse into the broader historical background of mycology. “Fungi are extremely important organisms, dating back hundreds of millions of years, they shape the very texture of the Earth,” Dr. Kaisian said. “But their stories are still mystical and often ignored.”

In addition to Miss Bunning’s watercolors and letters, the exhibition includes many other artifacts and experiences. Visitors can explore one of Peck’s microscopes and mushroom specimens, one of the recently collected by Dr. Kaysian, or marvel at the incredibly realistic wax sculpture of New York fungi, created for the museum in 1917 by artist Henri Marchand and his son Paul.

The murals, created by museum artists, show the biology of fungi, their role in ecosystems, and their evolutionary history. Rare Fossils of Prototaxite, a 30-foot-high fungus that lived during the Devonian period about 400 million years ago refers to how much the Earth has changed over time.

Overall, Dr. Kaysian said he hopes the exhibition will demonstrate why such natural history collections deserve public support and preservation.

The 150-year-old specimen, hidden in a cabinet where visitors rarely see scientists, maps the limits of a variety of organisms, both geographically and genetically.

“The Natural History Collection is an active repository for contemporary research,” Dr. Kaisian said. “We need more scientific communication about what’s going on here and why it’s important.”