agaric

plural agarics · alternative agarick

1. Any of various fungi, principally of the order Agaricales, having fruiting bodies consisting of umbrella-like caps, on stalks, with numerous gills beneath.

   […] I came to / Under a rainy ridge, in a goblin clump / Of agaric.

   1989, Ted Hughes, “Slump Sundays”, in Wolfwatching, London: Faber and Faber, page 4

   3 more examples

   […] these [commentators] were slight excrescences, mushrooms, champignons, that perished as the smoke of the dunghil evaporated, which reared them. A modern editor of Shakespeare is, on the contrary, a fungus attached to an oak; a male agaric of the most astringent kind, that, while it disfigures its form, may last for ages to disgrace the parent of its being.

   1765, William Kenrick, A Review of Doctor Johnson’s New Edition of Shakespeare, London: J. Payne, page 88

   Nobody cares for planting the poor fungus: so she shakes down from the gills of one agaric countless spores, any one of which, being preserved, transmits new billions of spores to-morrow or next day.

   1844, Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet”, in Essays. Second Series, Boston: James Munroe, pages 24–25

   1872, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King, “Gareth and Lynette” in Gareth and Lynette, Etc. London: Strahan & Co., p. 47, She thereat, as one / That smells a foul-flesh’d agaric in the holt, / And deems it carrion of some woodland thing, / Or shrew, or weasel, nipt her slender nose / With petulant thumb and finger,

2. A dried fruiting body of a fungus formerly used in medicine (now Laricifomes officinalis, formerly Fomitopsis officinalis, Fomes officinalis, Polyporus officinalis).

   Agarick to purge his flegme, lest he be too drowsie

   1624, John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, London: Thomas Jones, Devotion 8, Meditation, page 179