Myco-Roaming with Miriam
by Dorothy Beebee, founding member of the IMDI
How did it all start? In 1973, I had just completed illustrating the book “Warping All by Yourself” by Cay Garrett, which was finally published by Christine and Robert Thresh of Thresh Publications in Santa Rosa in May 1974. We were living in Monte Rio at the time, Bob was working as a ranch caretaker up in Philo at El Rancho Navarro while I stayed back in Monte Rio with Martin. The photos up there in Philo date to April 1974 so Martin turned 5 in April and would have started kindergarten the following September. We would go up to El Rancho on the weekends by Greyhound bus to hang out with Bob.
At some point during this time, the Threshes contacted me and asked me to illustrate a little book they were putting together about natural dyes from mushrooms written by an artist living up in Mendocino, Miriam C. Rice. They drove me up to Mendocino to meet Miriam (when?). If I am remembering correctly, all the Threshes had at first were some notes and mushroom dyed wool samples which Miriam had brought to show them. Thresh Publications had already published several small pamphlets about spinning with a drop spindle and making natural dyes, which is probably how Miriam had heard about them.
There were a lot of fiber artists living in the Mendocino area at that time and Miriam was teaching children’s art classes at the Mendocino Art Center and also at College of the Redwoods in Fort Bragg. It was apparently in one of those classes at the Art Center that she was teaching the kids how to make what she called “garbage dyes” out of such things as onion skins and carrot tops. She was also an avid hunter of edible mushrooms and one day on a whim picked some inedible bright yellow “sulphur tuft” mushrooms and threw them into the dye pot with some white wool to get an amazing bright yellow dye. (This is all detailed in the Mushrooms for Dyes, Paper, Pigments & Myco-Stix™ book). She immediately began experimenting with other mushrooms and kept notes of her mushroom dye experiments.
Robert and Christine convinced Miriam to return and put all her findings into manuscript form, which they then sent to me to make some mushroom drawings. I remember being so taken with it that I convinced the Threshes that they really needed to have color photos, rather than just pen & ink drawings in this book for it to make any sense at all.
At this time, Martin and I were spending weekends and longer periods of time up with Bob in Philo, and we started hunting mushrooms in the verdant woods to draw for Miriam’s book. We also had a challenging arrangement by which she would send mushrooms about 30 miles from the Mendocino post office via a very patient postman to an exceedingly patient postmaster in Philo who would then call me up at the ranch to walk down across the swinging suspension footbridge over the raging Navarro River to pick up a bunch of “smelly mushrooms” at the Philo post office! That is how the drawings of one Coprinus comatus mushroom turned into three drawings, as the “Shaggy Mane” on the frontispiece of Let’s Try Mushrooms for Color slowly and deliberately deliquesced in front of me!
Martin, who was 4 or 5 at that time, was my best mushroom collector since he was so close to the ground and so observant and curious about everything, and he always had Mama Dog following him and so if he got too far ahead of me, I could always call on Mama Dog (who was part shepherd, I think) to round him up and bring him back toward me. And I would study and draw the mushrooms at night, trying to learn and identify everything I could.