OUT OF THE DARKNESS

A FUNGI PIONEER'S LIFELONG WORK ON SHOW

- ALLA KATSNELSON/NYT

On an early summer day in 1876 near Druid Hill Park in Baltimore, USA, a middle-aged woman carrying three large, putrid mushrooms repulsed fellow travellers riding a horsedrawn trolley car.

Even wrapped in paper, the stench of the aptly named stinkhorn mushrooms was overpowering, but the woman stifled a laugh upon over-hearing two passengers gripe about the swarm of flies around them. The smell didn't bother her. All she cared about was getting the specimens home to study them, she would later write.

This was Mary Elizabeth Banning, a self-taught mycologist who, over the course of nearly four decades, conducted seminal research on the fungi of her state, Maryland.

Banning characterised thousands of specimens that she found in Balti-more and the surrounding countryside, identifying 23 species new to science at the time.

A gifted artist, she collected these observations into a manuscript called The Fungi Of Maryland. It consisted of 175 stunning watercolour plates, each an accurate yet intimate portrait of a given species, along with detailed scientific descriptions and anecdotes about collecting the mushrooms.

The manuscript was Banning's life's work, and she yearned to see it published. But it ended up in a drawer at the New York State Museum in Albany, forgotten for almost a century.

A selection of her watercolors makes up the backbone of an exhibition at the museum that opened this month and runs until Jan 4. The exhibition, called "Outcasts", recognises Banning's long-overlooked scientific legacy as well as the museum's mycology collection, which is one of the most historically significant in the country, according to Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, the museum's mycology curator, who conceived the exhibition.