What a beautiful color!

Recently some friends and I have been marveling over the beauty of the color periwinkle.  Yesterday, as I hiked my mushroom covered mountain, I came upon a mushroom of that very color.  What a thrill!  Who would have thought there would be a periwinkle mushroom?  Okay, okay, this color is perhaps leaning just a *tiny* bit toward the purple side but I’m still calling it periwinkle!

Another blue mushroom

In my mushroom picture taking past, I had run into another blue mushroom and I thought perhaps it might be the same species. My first task was to find those photos.  I have a wonderful system of filing photographs by whatever keyword I might choose.  Unfortunately I have to assign a keyword for the system to *work*, and I had not assigned any keywords for that blue mushroom.  So, to my more than 40,000 picts (the ones that are digitized) I went, searching for old blue.  It was years ago, but I had no idea exactly when.  In the 2006 grouping I came up with it.  An Indigo Lactarius, Lactarius indigo (Schwein.) Fr., and not the same species as my newfound periwinkle mushroom.

Research

My brain requires that I find the name of everything that I run into, on my hikes.  Since my periwinkle mushroom was not an Indigo Lactarius, this meant that I *had* to dig out my books, look up mushroom websites and figure it out.  At first I was discouraged and didn’t think I’d figure it out but I came upon a wonderful site with loads of good photographs and that helped provide my answer.  My periwinkle mushroom that I discovered yesterday is a Viscid Violet Cortinarius, Corinarius iodes Berk. & M.A. Curtis.

Mystery solved!

Hooray, my research paid off!  I love a mystery, but I need to have the mystery solved too.  In the case of my colorful blue mushroooms, my mystery has been solved!