Weekly Foraging

We have been foraging in the porous world of 19th-century mycology this week, with a beautiful collection of wild mushroom studies drawn from life at Malvern and Grasmere in 1858–9. The drawings are really quite early, even for the infancy of the discipline when the amateurs were indeed the experts—the elusive artist, 'E.R.P.' was perhaps one a hypothesised 'sisterhood' of female amateur mycologists in the Midlands around the middle of the century, that included M.F. Lewis (fl.1860–1902) [see image 5] and Sarah Price (fl.1864) [see image 6].

Image 5: Sarah Price, From 'Illustrations of the Fungi of Our Fields and Woods', 1865

Image 6: M.F. Lewis, From 'Fungi Collected in Shropshire and Other Neighborhoods', 1860–1902