Pope Clement VII has been called “the most unfortunate of the popes” which is a gruesome understatement considering that since he was elected in 1524, he had to battle Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, the near bankruptcy of the church, invasions from Turkey and England’s Henry VIII’s decision to break with the Catholic Church and confiscate all their property.  Then, in 1533, Clement died a horrible death from eating mushrooms.  The question is: now why are all those mushrooms suddenly appearing in your lawn and what can you do about it?

While strolling through my neighborhood a couple of days ago, I was startled to find hundreds of mushrooms—some as large a dinner plates—popping up in almost everybody’s lawn (including ours!), like some kind of botanical skin condition.

Mushrooms are creepy anyway.  Nutritionists will say that mushrooms are full of Vitamin D.  But before you sprinkle some on your pizza, take the time to identify the variety of mushroom you’ve got.  After all, you don’t want to end up like Pope Clement whose skin turned yellow before he went blind, his liver quit working and he died slowly in gastrointestinal agony from carelessly eating what is known as Death Cap mushrooms (the name should have given it away.)  Other poisonous mushrooms include Webcaps, Autumn Skullcap and my favorite, Destroying Angels.  These last mushrooms are particularly scary because they are easily mistaken for the kind of regular button mushrooms you buy in the grocery store.

Even non-toxic wild mushrooms should be approached with caution.  Take the stinkhorn, for example.  (No, actually, don’t.)  It has a conical dark cap, covered in green slime and it smells like rotting flesh.  Stinkhorn spores can be distributed by blowflies and it is common to find the mushroom glowing near the corpse of a rotting badger (I am not making that up).  In its early stages, a stinkhorn is said to be edible.  (Yeah, right.)  Stinkhorns are one of the mushrooms currently springing up in neighborhood lawns.

So, what do you do about lawn mushrooms?  A mower can chop up your mushrooms with a satisfying wet “flomp,”  But that will only efficiently distribute the spores all over your yards and probably your neighbor’s yard, too.  The mushroom that sticks up through your grass is only the visible part.  It is an indication of perhaps miles of fungus tendrils snaking through the soil under your grass.  That’s why you will sometimes see “fairy circles”—mushrooms growing in a circle out from their underground network.  In an online discussion of lawn mushrooms, one helpful contributor wrote, “The fairies have decided to colonize your lawn.  Don’t go out after midnight alone.  Leave them little gifts.  They like shiny things.”

As disturbing as the invasion of multi-colored mushrooms of varying sizes and shapes may be, horticulturalists assure us that the appearance of mushrooms is merely an indication of too much rain and an otherwise healthy and well-fed lawn.  There is nothing you have to do about them. Just don’t pick them up with your bare hands and don’t eat them.  And, to be on the safe side, you might leave them a quarter and a couple of cookies.