A Cemetery’s Big Secret: Lots of Weird Mushrooms

Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn is a treasure trove for amateur fungi hunters. Just don’t pick any.

Sigrid Jakob showed up to Green-Wood Cemetery hot on the heels of a recent victory: The deer dung she was cultivating in her apartment had just yielded a particularly exciting specimen of fungi. She’d gathered the dung in a park in the Bronx, she said, and was currently storing it in Tupperware that once housed takeout. She guessed she had eight Tupperwares worth of dung collected at the time; she was observing them for fungal growth. This is par for the course for Ms. Jakob, 55, who is the president of the New York Mycological Society and a founder of the newly formed Green-Wood Fungi Phenology Project — although she said she’s careful not to collect anything malodorous so as not to exceed the patience of her family.