Mushroom

Unlike plants, mushrooms can’t get energy from the sun because they lack chlorophyll. Instead, mushrooms live either symbiotically or parasitically with trees.

Most of the mushrooms growing on the forest floor in Blue Hills — like this one on Wampatuck Hill — are coexisting with a nearby tree, specifically between the root ends of a tree and the vegetative system of the mushroom.

Both tree and mushroom benefit from this arrangement: The mushroom helps the tree extract minerals and water from the soil, while the tree supplies the mushroom with some of the sugars it got from photosynthesis.

Though mushroom fruiting bodies are short-lived, the underlying system can itself be long-lived and massive. Most of a mushroom’s body generally lives undergound.