The lack of language used to describe scent might explain why in the history of scientific classification of stinkhorns in the order of Phallales botanists have made more reference to their phallic form rather than their fetid smell. And yet there’s no doubt, stinkhorns look like pricks.

The stinkhorn mushroom first emerges from the earth as buff, leathery-skinned gelatinous sac colloquially known as a “witch’s egg” from which bursts a long, gently curving shaft or “stipe”. This event happens with such force that it’s been calculated that an erupting stinkhorn is capable of lifting over 130 kilos, a weight equivalent to that of an average western lowland gorilla. Stinkhorn mushrooms have been known to break through roads and pavements like miniature pneumatic drills (Niksic et al., 2004, 21–22). Seemingly incongruous with this Herculean strength, the stipe of the mature stinkhorn feels extremely brittle, which is hollow, crumbles easily between one’s fingers, and is finely perforated with a texture similar to prawn or animal-skin crackers. Loosely attached to its tip is a conical cap or “glans”, a shape which, as its name suggests, is similar to the bell-end of a human penis. The cap is completed by a small, round hole like a urethral orifice. Early botanists erroneously believed it was through this hole that the mushroom ejected its foul odour. As Junius writes in his early dissertation on the mushroom, “Its highest point … possesses an opening, whence issues a powerful exhalation,” (1564, translation by Caroline Spearing, 2021). Flemish botanist Carolus Clusius was closer to the truth when, writing forty years later, he observed that the smell came from a brownish substance that developed over the cap itself: “The reeking cap of the mushroom is shaped like a helmet similar to the nut-like tip of the penis. The cap is first white in colour becoming brown with age at which time it emits a fetid odour (Clusisus, 1601, 295, translation mine). Clusius’ chronology of the mushroom’s development is not quite right, however. When it first emerges from its egg, the smooth cap of the mushroom is covered in an olivaceous gel which quickly darkens as it deliquesces, turning white only after swarms of insects have devoured its slimy surface, thus deodorizing it. It is this sticky, greenish-brown substance, called the “gleba”, from which the stink of the stinkhorn emanates. The word gleba is used in mycology to describe internally produced spores of gasteroid (“stomach-like”) fungi, such as stinkhorns, puffballs, and earthballs. Gleba means “clod” or “lump of earth”, an appropriate term for the dirt-coloured goop that binds the spore mass to the mushroom’s tip. 

The lifecycle of the stinkhorn fungus is fleeting, appearing and disappearing at a speed practically visible to the naked eye. The mushroom becomes fully erect in a matter of hours and its slimy cap is denuded in far less time revealing a pale skin beneath, chequered by a series of honeycomb indentations similar to the texture of tripe (the word mycologist use to describe this texture is reticulated meaning “net-like”). Thereafter the mushroom becomes flaccid, falling to the forest floor where it rots and is reabsorbed into the earth.

As Aunty Etty or any seasoned mushroom forager will tell you, the stink of the stinkhorn comes first, the sight second. And though it’s not always easy to put into words, we all know this smell, know it intuitively, recalling it somewhere deep within our bodies. The stink of the stinkhorn is a primordial smell, the ur-smell, the smell of rot. Moreover, it’s a smell forewarned by the sound of humming, a word which in British English means both a continuous sound and an unpleasant smell. 

and hadriani, images of which appear alongside this article) the stench quickly becomes intolerable, teasing out flies from behind walls and beneath floorboards. As Junius observed, removed from its original environment in nature to the interior of the human habitat the stinkhorn “exhales an aura so virulent as to be able to pervade the air of an entire room.”

Despite these noxious and nauseating effects, humans have still been tempted to eat parts, or all, of the stinkhorn mushroom at various stages in its growth. In France and Germany, for example, the immature stinkhorn egg is often eaten when the smell is less pronounced. The taste is said to be “radish-like” (Schaechter, 1998, 172). You don’t have to go hunting yourself to savour these mycogastronomic delights. From the comfort of your own home you can order from Amazon one-hundred-gram bags of dried bridal veil stinkhorns Phallus indusiatus to lend your stews an earthy flavour (rinsed of their slime, their fruity-faecal odour is not dissimilar to chipotle chillies). 

. The man explained that he kept the wilting fungus there as a talisman to ease his rheumatism, though Smith points out that “the species has no properties to effect such a cure” (Smith, 1951, 35–36). More likely than the mushroom healing the man, the man was helping the mushroom by tramping through the forest and spreading its spores. In spite of its malodour, it is extraordinary how this phallic mushroom has so compelled humans, like other animals, to do its bidding. Its shape, much as its smelly and slimy qualities, surely has a lot to do with this. Unsurprisingly, another use of the stinkhorn reported in folk history is its addition to “aphrodisiac potions for both man and beast” to aid erectile dysfunction (Schaechter, 1998, 170). 

In their book The Romance of the Fungus World, Rolfe and Rolfe describe the odour of stinkhorns as “intolerable”, “evil-smelling”, “fetid” (Rolfe and Rolfe, 1925, 25–25; 263). W.P.K. Findlay pronounces them as “abominable”, resembling “that of a fox” or “defective drains” (Findlay, 1982, 52). Phillips says their smell is “strong, sickly, offensive […] reminiscent of rotting meat” (Phillips, 2006, 338). Stinkhorn odour is so powerfully diffusive that it has been said a “bitch in heat” can pick up its scent from up to three miles away (Phillips, 2019). In olfactory terms, the space a single stinkhorn occupies above ground is enormous (see Johnson and Jürgens, 2010). 

The stinkhorn lifecycle relies upon flies to disperse its spores. The synthesised stench of decaying flesh and dung in the air causes insect antennae to twitch, luring flies with the promise of food or a potential brood site in which to lay their eggs. A study from 2005 found that in the right conditions carrion flies can detect the smell of rotting meat from several kilometres away (Nazni Wasi et al., 2005, 53–54). By some evolutionary quirk it shares with other sapromyophilic plants (odoriferous plants pollinated by carrion flies), such as the stinking corpse lily Rafflesia arnoldii, the dead horse or arum lily Helicodiceros muscivorus, or the titan arum lily Amorphophallus titanumarum, the stinkhorn fungus has managed to become attuned to this phenomenon thus ensuring its place on Earth. (Note, the link between lilies and the scent of death is the odorant indole. The origin of the association of lilies with funeral parlours was functional rather than decorative, as the indolic scent of the flowers’ stamens would help mask the smell of cadavers stored out the back; see Ayers, 2017). 

Flies found feeding off stinkhorn slime are predominantly the species Polietes lardaria, Phaonia subventa, blowflies Lucilia Caesar, Lucilia sericata, Calliphora vicina and the bluebottle Calliphora vomitoria (Sleeman et al., 1996, 986). The Latin name for latter is ironic. Calliphora means “bearer of beauty”, named, no doubt, for the brilliant metallic blue of the insect’s abdomen; whereas vomitoria could mean either an emetic—something that provokes vomiting—or, alternatively, a place where one is sick, such as the vomitoria of the ancient Romans where during feasts they would (allegedly) make themselves throw up to allow them to devour more food, hence the meaning of vomitorium as a passageway in the amphitheatre where people would “spew forth”. The scientific name for the bluebottle is thus descriptive of both how it looks and how it eats, regurgitating its food before devouring it again. The sight of a swarm of feeding Calliphora vomitoria, so their name implies, is beautiful enough that it makes one want to puke.

Instead of a protein-rich animal corpse, flies find in the ripe stinkhorn a sweet, sticky slime which they feed off frenziedly. The flies then carry off particles of spore-rich slime to other parts of the forest on their limbs. (It’s been claimed that a single speck of stinkhorn slime on the hair of a fly may contain twenty million spores) and in their faeces [Findlay, 1982, 52]). Stinkhorn slime has a laxative effect on flies meaning spore dispersal occurs near the mushroom, therefore increasing the fungus’ chance of growth in similarly rich soil (Sleeman et al., 1996, 989–90). It’s not unusual to find in just one spot several stinkhorns in various states of engorgement poking up through the soil like the pricks of dead men (another folk name for the stinkhorn: “Deadman’s cock”).

Stink is relative. To the flesh- or shit-eating fly, stink is the promise of food and fecundity. 

To humans, stink is a signifier of death and disease. In his book Smells, Robert Muchembled argues that this has always been the case, dismissing the idea that in “days of yore” folk must have been more used to, and therefore inured to the pervasive stench of the towns and countryside (Muchembled, 2020, 16–17). Muchembled: “In every culture, negative signals received by the brain are associated with death, warning the body of the risk of harm. […] No human society is indifferent to smells” (Ibid). 

There are some mushrooms, writes British mycologist M.C. Cooke, whose smells “once inhaled are never to be forgotten” (Cooke, 1875, 116). Cooke includes in this list the common stinkhorn Phallus impudicus, a stench, he writes, which is much more intensified in the Clathrus or red cage stinkhorn: “It is very probable that, after all, the odour of the Phallus would not be so unpleasant if it were not so strong. It is difficult to imagine, when one encounters a slight sniff borne on a passing breeze, that there is the element of something not by any means unpleasant about the odour when so diluted; yet it must be confessed that when carried in a vasculum, in a close carriage, or railway car, or exposed in a close room, there is no scruple about pronouncing the odour intensely fetid. The experience of more than one artist, who has attempted the delineating of the Clathrus from the life, is to the effect that the odour is unbearable even by an enthusiastic artist determined on making a sketch” (Ibid, 116).

That attempts by artists to depict stinkhorns from life have been stymied by the sheer strength of their stench is something to which I can testify. It must be done fast and in short bursts so as to draw breath, and using multiple specimens which must soon after be thrown away, wrapped in several sheets of paper, double-bagged, and disposed of at a distance from one’s home (rather than burned in the drawing-room fire). In this haste, something essential about the mushroom is lost, however. As Cooke suggests, it’s because of the intensity of their odour that stinkhorns seem to resist true, that is, total artistic representation. 

The sight of the stinkhorn has captivated male (for they were mostly male) botanists ever since it was first described by Pliny the Elder in his encyclopaedic Natural History. A hundred years after the Natural History was first published in Europe, Dutch physician and botanist Adriaan de Jonghe, better known as Hadrianus Junius, produced a sixteen-page pamphlet describing a single species of mushroom in prose, poetry and illustration. The pamphlet features a wonderful wood-cut of the mushroom by Dutch artist Maarten van Heemskerck (1498–1574) articulating it into its constituent parts. Junius’ anatomical description together with Heemskerck’s illustration presented to the public for the first time an autopsy (literally “the act of seeing with one’s own eyes”) of a mushroom. 

It’s hardly surprising that the author of the first ever publication about a single species of mushroom chose for his subject the stinkhorn. For to gaze upon the stinkhorn is to witness nature at its most brazen. Junius called his mushroom “Phallus” on account of its resemblance to the tumescent cock of the Greek ithyphallic demigod Priapus. It was later classified as Phallus hadriani in homage to Junius (the Latin name literally translates as “Adriaan’s phallus”). English herbalist John Gerard (1633) called it the “Pricke mushroom”. John Parkinson (1640), the “Hollanders Workingtoole”. However, in the history of scientific classification, none of the Latin epithets ascribed to any species of Phallus reference the fact that they stink. Instead, all refer to their resemblance to an erect human penis. The name for the common stinkhorn Phallus impudicus given to it by Linnaeus in 1753 means “impudent” or “shameless phallus”. The scientific name for the beautifully veiled bamboo fungus Phallus indusiatus means, weirdly, “phallus with an undergarment”. Phallus atrovolvatus is more generous to gender. Described as new to science in 2005, P. atrovolvatus translates as “phallus with a blackened womb” on account of the gloomy colour of the egg from which the mature mushroom pricks up. But this is a rare deviation from a largely phallocentric tradition of naming. 

The prioritising of sight over smell in the classification of stinkhorns is at odds with the colloquial names Europeans have for them. For example, in Germany and Russia, Phallus impudicus is known as the “stinky morel”, a reference to the mushroom’s likeness to the morel’s brain-like cap. In Czech it’s the “stink snake”. In Bulgaria, the “stinking sponge”. In Bosnia it’s known as the “stinking singer” (my favourite). The French call it le satyre puant, the “stinking satyr”, a name that captures both the sight and smell of the mushroom with the classical allusion early naturalists so enjoyed. And yet to focus on the phallus is to ignore the function of the stinkhorn, its raison d'être. That is, to stink.