The Morel of the Story

By Amy Flurry
October 7, 2011

Morel Mushrooms For Anthony Benton Gude, the thrill of hunting for morels today is just as intoxicating as the very first time he picked one of the bell-shaped mushrooms. He was eight years old then and his grandfather, regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton, purchased a 280-acre farm in the northeast corner of Kansas. On a walk with their family and neighbors, they turned up enough morels among the spring flowers and deciduous woods for an impressive sauce for dinner. Gude was hooked.

Over the years he returned for the spring harvest, learning the secret spots in the undisturbed woods in the valleys and draws that produce mushrooms without fail and recognizing the conditions that would encourage a plentiful bounty in the spring season. “It takes warm days and nights with temps over 40 degrees, then at least half an inch of rain to get them going,” says Gude. “But when conditions are just right, morels can pop up so abundantly they can be found growing out of rocks.”

Morel Mushrooms

morel mushrooms from Anthony Benton Gude's family farm

Like his grandfather, Gude, 48, is an artist and splits time between his home on Martha’s Vineyard and the Kansas farm. He began painting the bucolic farmlands and iconic scenes of the Midwest landscape as a young man. His most recent mural, a 5.5-foot by 14-foot painting depicting Route 66 as the “Mother Road,” hangs in Joplin, Missouri’s City Hall right next to a mural of the exact dimensions by his grandfather.

Morel Mushrooms

Artist Anthony Benton Gude's most recent mural hangs in Joplin, Missouri's City Hall right next to a mural by his grandfather, also an artist.

“One of the first serious paintings I ever did was a morel scene,” says Gude. “I think I was 14 and I used what would become one of my compositional standards—a very close foreground or bug’s eye view that recedes to a distant background. My granddad used this and I must have absorbed the idea simply growing up around his works.”

For a painter, the appeal of the morel and its honeycombed texture is easy to see. And when morels camouflage against the mottled palette of winter’s silver and gray leaves, they are difficult to spot even when you’re looking directly at one. “When you do finally see one it seems that the mushroom just magically appeared!” says Gude. “It’s a subject you just don’t get tired of painting.”

Morel Mushrooms

paintings by Anthony Benton Gude: "Old Bigelow" and "8 Morels"

Gude doesn’t tire of the hunt, either. “It’s like an adult version of an Easter egg gathering,” he says. A good day’s harvest in an average year, Gude says, will yield a hundred or so morels. Hunters collect them in netted bags so that the spores can drop out and add to the next year’s crop.

Morel Mushrooms

Anthony Benton Gude (right) and friend picking morels. Hunters collect them in netted bags so that the spores can drop out and add to the next year’s crop.

2011 proved to be a very good year indeed for Gude and his friends. On a whim he checked a place along a nearby river, an area that had not produced a single morel since a flood in 1993. “From that spot this year we hauled in between two and three thousand morels in a single day, day-after-day for almost two weeks,” he says.

What made this year’s bumper crop so much better than all the rest will be the topic of discussion for years to come, says Gude.

Morel Mushrooms

The surplus proved lucrative for many in the neighboring community. “There were so many morels that restaurants were buying them fresh for $22 to $35 a pound, says Gude, who opted to dehydrate the delicacies and share with his family. “I strung them up the old-fashioned method using a needle and thread and had the morels hanging all over the house to dry. But I have friends who put them on eBay and had buyers from three states. We may never know why this year was so exceptional, but 2011 will go down as the best morel year in our history on this farm.”

Some of Gude's friends who went morel hunting with this year made this t-shirt to commemorate the bumper crop. It's available on eBay. Click on the image above.