On the third Tuesday of each month from September thru May, the Mycological Society of San Francisco has a General Meeting at the Randall Museum. The highlight of each meeting is a speaker with slides on some aspect of mycology and mushrooming: ecology, taxonomy, mycophagy, sociology, etc. Before each meeting members bring collections which are put on display and identified. Refreshments are served before the meeting. Doors open and identification starts at 7 pm and the meeting starts at 8 pm. (The December meeting is replaced by a dinner at a different location.)
Christian Schwarz has been seriously interested in fungi since he was in high school in San Diego. The long, dry summers there didn’t suit his lifestyle, so he emigrated to Santa Cruz, the land of milk (caps) and honey (mushrooms). His travels so far have taken him all over the United States, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Europe. He is currently in the midst of authoring Mushrooms of the Redwood Coast – a fully illustrated field guide to mushrooms of California, building a web database to document the mycoflora of Santa Cruz County and writing for his blog Notes of a Mycophile. Mushrooms arouse his curiosity with their sundry forms; from the grotesque to the bizarre to the sublime. Taxonomically, he’s interested in the genus Agaricus and the family Entolomataceae.
