Mushrooms haven’t always had a good press. A 17th-century doctor, Stephen Bradwell, described them as ‘a bundle of putrefaction, arising of a cold, moist, viscous matter of the Earth’. DH Lawrence’s poem ‘How Beastly the Bourgeois Is’ attacked the middle-class Englishman – ‘so sleek and erect and eyeable –/ and like a fungus living on the remains of bygone life’. Lately though, mushrooms have been exalted: they’re marketed, sometimes in microdose form, by the wellness industry; appear on catwalks and get championed as alternatives to leather by designers such as Stella McCartney; and are held up by best-selling biologist Merlin Sheldrake as symbols of less selfish, planet-destroying ways of being – ‘Fungi are really powerful poster organisms for ecological thinking.’
The Gourmand’s Mushroom, from the team behind the eponymous former food and culture journal, draws on art, cultural history and recipes to celebrate all things mycological. Mushrooms, it turns out, are everywhere – not just in Oregon, home to Armillaria ostoyae, a ‘humongous fungus’ spanning 1,000 hectares and weighing 30,000 tonnes – but within us: they share 50 per cent of their DNA with humans. The ancient Egyptians believed they were gifts from the god Osiris; they’re found in rock paintings in Australia and eastern Tanzania, at burial sites in Kerala and as part of psychoactive rituals across Mesoamerica.
The earliest depiction of mushrooms in Western art is reputed to be Hieronymus Bosch’s Haywain Triptych (c1516), a surging fever-dream of a painting that leads book contributor Jennifer Higgie to wonder if the Dutchman ‘used hallucinogens to inspire his wild visions’. At least as delirious is Flournoy Holmes’s gatefold sleeve for Eat a Peach, a 1972 LP by the Allman Brothers Band that features a lysergic Middle Earth overflowing with bulbous mushrooms. Still startling is Antoni Gaudí’s use of a fly agaric – a poisonous species that’s bright red with white warts – as the cupola on top of Casa del Guarda in Barcelona (1901–1903).
Mushrooms can represent almost anything. They can be phallic and carnal. Feculent and scary. Like sea anemones, like satellite dishes. Paul Klee’s The Mushroom (1925) is eerie, a premonition of AI art. Beatrix Potter saw and painted toadstools as delightful, dancing children: ‘I cannot tell what possesses me with the fancy that they laugh and clasp their hands.’
In Mordecai Cooke’s Handbook of British Fungi (1871), the specimens resemble a cross between a Dalí-designed sofa and the sensual lips of a 1960s rock star. Andy Warhol’s Cream of Mushroom (1968), a screen print based on his ‘Campbell’s Soup Can’ series, is a cheery mirror to US consumerism. Takashi Murakami’s garish, comic-book-like Mushroom Boom (2000) channels nuclear nightmares in its depiction of a skull-shaped mushroom cloud.
Such vastly different responses support the theory of the composer John Cage (who, in 1959, won 5 million lire on an Italian quiz show for answering questions on his specialist subject of fungi): ‘Ideas are to be found in the same way that you find wild mushrooms in the forest, by just looking.’
Mushrooms – psychoactive, medicinal or delicious – have fascinated us for millennia, facilitating spiritual quests in ancient and modern times and inspiring artists from Bosch to Kusama. Dig into The Gourmand’s in-depth mycological journey, stuffed with stories and original recipes.
A version of this article appears in the July 2026 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers. Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, and be the first to receive exclusive stories like this one, direct to your inbox
