Philadelphia library hosts beginner talk on mushroom identification and ecology

Curious beginners packed Parkway Central Library for a 90-minute mushroom talk that treated city foraging as a lesson in caution first. Kevin Popowich of the Philadelphia Mycology Club led All about Mushrooms with Philadelphia Mycology Club on Thursday, June 11, 2026 at 6:00 p.m. in the Science & Wellness department, using the room to walk listeners through fungal morphology, key identifying features, and the ecological significance of fungi.

The setup made the library feel less like a lecture hall and more like the first stop in an urban mycologist’s education. The program was framed as a way to look at greenspaces and hiking trails through mushrooms, which matters in a city where the easiest places to notice fungi are often sidewalk tree pits, parks, and trail edges. The emphasis was not on rushing into harvesting. It was on learning how to look, how to compare traits, and how to build safe habits before touching anything in the field.

That approach fits the Philadelphia Mycology Club’s public identity. The group says it is volunteer-run, free, year-round, and has no formal memberships or dues. Its mission stretches beyond identification into accessibility, diversity, inclusivity, fungal conservation, and environmental justice, with work alongside environmental groups around Philadelphia and Greater Philadelphia. Bethany Teigen founded the club in 2018 after finding mushrooms growing between Philadelphia cobblestones, and the organization has since grown into a steady presence for novice and experienced mycologists alike.

The safety message is not abstract. Pennsylvania health officials warned in 2022 about an increase in mushroom-poisoning reports, including cases involving Amanita phalloides and Amanita bisporigera. Pennsylvania also requires approved training and an exam for people harvesting wild mushrooms for retail sale, and retail-sale mushrooms cannot be taken from federal, state, or local parks and forests without authorization. That makes public talks on morphology and ecology more than hobby programming. They are part of the basic infrastructure for anyone thinking seriously about urban foraging.

Philadelphia’s library system has been building that culture for a while. A similar beginner-friendly mushroom program ran at Falls of Schuylkill Library in September 2024, and a June fungi walk with the Philadelphia Mycology Club at the Discovery Center paired field observation with iNaturalist documentation. The pattern is clear: in Philadelphia, mushroom education is becoming the bridge between curiosity and restraint, and Parkway Central Library was another place where that bridge was built before anyone was asked to harvest a thing.