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Philly is about to get fungadelic.
The Philadelphia Mycology Club is throwing their third annual Fungadelphia Festival on Saturday to celebrate the little fungi that make up a big part of the local culture. The event will take place at the Schuylkill Center in Upper Roxborough from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
The festival will include live music, mushroom-themed artwork for sale, a myco-tasting demonstration and free food. True fungi-nerds can come together to check out the mold and microscopy examination table.
“It is a celebration of all things fungi,” said Sam Bucciarelli, president of the Philadelphia Mycology Club. “We’re going to have a culinary demonstration, a tincture workshop — a couple talks about biodiversity.”
“I think it’s gonna be a lot of fun this year,” she added.
“Cool, weird, tiny stuff”
Bucciarelli initially joined the Mycology Club when it was still just a Facebook group in 2018. After meeting founder Bethany Teigen at a festival the following year, Bucciarelli realized they could organize in-person meetups. From there, she helped it grow into a non-profit organization.
“I was like ‘I’m in, I want to do this with you,’” Bucciarelli said. “I’m really good at planning trails and leading walks.”
In 2023, Bucciarelli became the group’s president and began organizing its annual Fungadelphia festival.
“We also have natural dyers coming. We’re gonna make a tie-dye wooden mushroom with plant-based dyes,” Bucciarelli said. “Oh, and guided walks. How could I forget?”
Pennsylvania has thousands of species of fungi — as well as many that are yet to be discovered. “Fungi tend to outnumber plants six to one in species diversity in any given ecosystem,” Bucciarelli said.
The group will set out on trails for guided mushroom walks and bring their findings back to an identification table.
Danny Newman is a photographer and parataxonomist — a less specialized individual who assists in collecting, sorting and documenting biodiversity specimens. He focuses on fungi and will be giving a talk at 1:30 p.m.
“I’ve been asked to hang out around the ID table before my talk,” Newman said. He’s most looking forward to “all the cool, weird, tiny stuff that people bring in and go, ‘I don’t know what this is.’”
The “shroom boom”
Bucciarelli and Newman both noted that there has been a growing interest in mycology ever since the film “Fantastic Fungi” made its way to Netflix in 2021. The popular television show “The Last of Us” features a zombie-like Cordyceps species, and the animated series “Common Side Effects” is about a mushroom that can heal all sicknesses.
“I wish there was a better term for it, but in the business, we call that the ‘shroom boom,’” Newman noted.
For his part, Newman has been fascinated by fungi ever since he was a toddler poking around his backyard.
“My parents would yell at me from the balcony, ‘Danny, don’t touch those mushrooms,’” he said. “But I then began what was a many-year tradition of doing the very opposite of whatever my parents told me — and touched mushrooms.”
Newman’s talk will focus on ascomycetes, tiny, easily-overlooked fungi that are much more diverse than the classic cap-and-stem mushroom. They help shape forests, crops, soils and nutrient cycles. He will delve into a mycology event that he founded — the Korf Foray — an ascomycete-focused retreat held in honor of Richard P. Korf, a towering figure in discomycete research.
“Sam has been kind enough to not schedule anything after me, because she knows that it’s going to run probably a little longer,” Newman joked of his hour-long talk.
Bucciarelli is excited about all the fungal species the group could discover on Saturday.
“Mushrooms are sort of like water balloons,” she said. “So if there’s no rain, then there’s no mushrooms. But we have been really blessed with a lot of rain this summer, and in a single day, if we’re really collecting, we might pick up over 100 specimens that are interesting and beautiful.”
Anyone from fungi-experts to the mushroom-curious can join in the fun.
“I hope [attendees] take away a sense of community,” Bucciarelli said. “I feel that that’s really what Fungadelphia is about. It’s about engaging with people where they are in their journey with loving mushrooms, and that they know that there is a thriving community to support them.”
