Mushrooms

Texas Mushrooms Project

My biggest mushroom project so far is built around texasmushrooms.org, Alexey Sergeev’s photo diary of seventeen years of mushroom walks in the forests north of Houston. I scraped his archive and turned it into a live map and seasonal visualization:

• The visualization site: 8,800 photographs as a map and a calendar
• texasmushrooms.org: the original, and the best part

Mushroom Blog Posts

• Mushrooms Follow the Rain: An Ode to texasmushrooms.org Aug 16, 2026

How I Got Into Mushrooms

I am known as the mushroom guy and I have no shame for it at all. I don’t recall when I first got into mushrooms, but I must give some credit to early screenings of the mushroom hat wearing mycologist Paul Stamets, who seeded some initial interest into the world of fungi. Looking back through my photos I see some early photographs of mushrooms in mid-October 2018 but it was the mushroom below that got me really interested in mushrooms.

I remember walking on UH campus with Lindsey where I spotted within the low shrubs of a planter this white and red thing sticking out of a root. I remember not even wanting to touch the weird looking mangled organism, and I was using two sticks as chopsticks to handle the mushroom thinking it was poisonous. This tortured little ganoderma had a soft leading edge of white sponginess, a firm top and woody stem.

The very next day, I come upon another striking mushroom, my first observation of a russula. This red beauty, known also as a brittle gills, was my first identification I was confident of, and since then mushrooms have remained a consistent interest and hobby of mine.

More of my findings: