Mushroom Lingo #1: Reticulate

Words are power, and one of the early obstacles to identifying mushrooms is understanding the terminology of the field guides. Today we’ll focus on the adjective “reticulate” because recently I’ve found lots of the Ornate Stalked Bolete, which illustrates that term perfectly.

Reticulate is not just a mushrooming term, but it’s also not common knowledge. It means “resembling a net or network,” and can also be used as a verb, to reticulate, which means to form a net or network, or as a noun, reticulum. In the case of mushrooms, it’s usually used to refer to a kind of net-like pattern on the stem. For example,

This kind of reticulate stem is most common with boletes, and is a kind of extension of the pore surface down the stipe— a little bit like how gilled mushrooms are sometimes “decurrent,” meaning their gills run down the stem. The stipe can be strongly reticulate, weakly reticulate, or just reticulate at the apex. And that’s about all there is to it!