Fungi

Each planting season, Claudia Bashian-Victoroff ventures out into Bole Woods, a 70-acre old-growth forest on the outskirts of Holden Forests & Gardens in the Cleveland suburbs, in search of fungi. But as she navigates the sugar maples, chestnut oaks, American beech and western red cedar that tower overhead, she focuses not on the forest floor but on what lies beneath. Kneeling beside a stand of maples, she clears away the leaf litter to reveal the topsoil and digs up the first few inches, where the vast majority of soil microbes are active.