Foxfire Brings Magical Light to the Dark Forest

Tal Galton has been walking backward for a quarter mile. Over broken stone. Over fallen leaves. I am among a handful of people following the naturalist through the deciduous forest of Celo, a small community land trust in western North Carolina. And none of us bringing up his peculiar choice to not look where he’s going. Walking backward is counterintuitive. But so is walking in the dark. Yet here we are, traveling toward dusk, because we are on a quest to glimpse foxfire—glowing fungi known to turn forest floors into scenes from a fever dream.

The purpose of fungi’s bioluminescent function remains unclear, but some species use it to attract insects that might help spread its spores. Prior to electricity, people harvested foxfire to read by its light at night. Early submarines mounted it behind glass. Its chemical compounds are used to track things in the human body like infections and cancer cells. Historically, logs alight with foxfire were arranged on the ground to outline nocturnal paths. In 2015, a team at the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry found a way to isolate a fungal protein to create luminescent plants that they suggested might one day serve as energy-efficient street lamps, though green light emitted from all directions would present a light pollution issue. It all sounds terribly newfangled. But in some ways, it’s the kind of creative, living alternative to artificial light that my Granny and Papaw might have appreciated.

The farther we travel into the woods, the soggier the ground gets. It’s clear from the darkness of the overstory that we’ve entered areas that don’t see much sunlight. One minute, we’re in complete darkness. Then a bioluminescent tree appears. Tal doesn’t need to point it out. His main task was leading us here so that we could discover it ourselves.

This is something beyond handheld marvels; it’s an entire tree trunk covered in a glow that no one knows what to call. The light looks, to me, slightly bluer than the green light of bitter oysters. We cannot see the shape of a single mushroom from here. They’re too small. But we can discern the profile of the tree they’re growing on.

Each mushroom appears as a chink in glowing armor that’s covering an ash tree. This concerned Tal at first, because emerald ash borers—invasive insects native to Asia—have already decimated millions of ash trees in North America. Borers might even have played a role in what we’re seeing, since the dead parts of this tree are what fungi are feasting on.

The light of the tree draws us in, and our single-file line turns into a mass of awkwardly bumping elbows as we try to figure out where to stand. My careful navigation of the path is forgotten. I am so focused on the lights that I end up with branches in my face. The tip of a limb slips through my lips, hooking me like a fish. I sputter and wave my hands erratically to escape.

Branches guide me to the ground where, on the tree’s north side, I crawl on hands and knees, until I’m nearly close enough to feel the tree’s moss-bearded face against my cheek. I cannot see individual dots of light until I am less than an inch away. There, I can make out capped mushrooms that shoot out of the tree to rise upward like umbrellas the size of pinheads.

Tal has sent samples of them to a mycologist who is attempting to help him sleuth out where the fungi fit. “Figuring out how to get DNA in a way that might work for identification has been hard,” he says.

Tal’s contact suspects that it’s an undescribed species. But there’s a chance it’s a known species that wasn’t previously known to glow. Or that it is known to glow elsewhere and is a surprise resident of the region. “If it is an undescribed species, who gets to name it?” someone asks.

Tal isn’t sure. A male voice calls out a suggestion, “The Tal Mushroom!”

Immediately, Tal rejects the idea. “It bothers me when I’m learning about something and it’s named after a human being,” he says. “I don’t think species or places should be named after people. All species have their own attributes. I like it when things are named after their characteristics. The blue ghost, for instance. That’s a name that helps you recognize it when you see it.”

“So what are the attributes of this?” I ask.

“It glows; it’s tiny,” he says.

“Maybe something like ‘tiny lantern’?” I say. “As in: ‘Look! Over there! I think that tree is covered in tiny lanterns, first described in the Celo community of western North Carolina!’”

“There you go!” Tal says.

As we walk on in darkness, it seems the conversation has been forgotten. But the forest is so quiet, outside of the scraping of our soles against rocks and roots, that I can make out the sound of Tal whispering to himself in Latin. “Minima laternis, tiny lanterns,” he mumbles.

“You know,” Tal says, still ruminating over our conversation about tiny lanterns, “I think it’s good to call species ‘undescribed’ rather than ‘undiscovered.’ I’m not the first person to find those, I’m sure. There were people who knew about that species at some point in history,” he says, acknowledging that we’re walking ancestral homelands of the Cherokee. “The thing is, most of us don’t see the world around us, not even in daylight anymore, really. Plant blindness. You’ve heard of it?”

The term was coined in the 1990s as a way of talking about how people—particularly those from traditions that do not incorporate plants into spiritual and cultural practices—have a bias to overlook and underappreciate specific plant species. Studies have found that plant blindness, which is sometimes referred to as plant awareness disparity, alters how greatly people care about conservation efforts, with less knowledge leading to less concern.

Standing in the night shade of Celo’s community forest, it’s hard not to wonder if light pollution is being allowed to increase at exponential rates because, as a whole—particularly in parts of the world where artificial light is most overused—humans are experiencing a similar, relational disconnect with darkness. We depend on natural nights just as we depend on plants. We have become not only species unaware; due to the endless faux days we’ve created, we’ve now reached a point where we hardly notice that night itself has its own characteristics and functions.

Plant awareness disparity isn’t as great in some cultures as it is in the United States’ mainstream. Studies have shown that in India and Sweden and diverse Indigenous communities around the world, the spiritual, emotional, and practical relationships people have with plants encourage connection. It might not be a coincidence, then, that I was inspired to seek out the nocturnal wonders of foxfire because Foxfire has, for all my life, been something associated with subcultural Appalachian folkways— including things like planting gardens in accordance to moon cycles—familiar because they’ve been practiced by my ancestors in these mountains for more than seven generations.

Humans have been found to be more adept at identifying animals than plants. Plant awareness disparity is thought to be a chemical and visual bias of the human brain—which, overwhelmed, tends to lump what it cannot easily process—but it’s something that can be overcome with species proximity and cultural conditioning, as evidenced in communities around the globe. Seemingly in their own wisdom, foxfire species have presented themselves not as part of the relentless din of day, but rather as gems laid out against velvet night to be inspected as precious.

Our time with Tal is officially over, but no one walks back to their cars. Instinctively, we form a circle. Here, we have seen forms of light that relatively few humans ever have. Not one of us is ready to leave, not even the teenager, whose cell phone remains tucked away of her own volition.

“Being out here is a privilege,” Tal says, acknowledging the rarity of having unfettered access to a place like this, particularly one that, unlike many public lands in the area, is relatively flat, lowering our chances of walking off a cliff.

Even though we’ve been wowed by fungi, it’s the depth of Celo’s darkness that seems a luxury.

Tonight, as members of the group travel home, we will reestablish our dependence on artificial light as we start our cars. Before this, we might not have considered how headlights stand to negatively alter our vision. We might have erroneously assumed the brighter the lights, the better our sight. Recently, I learned that the pirates that populate childhood storybooks wore patches over their eyes not to hide some sword-fight disfiguration, as I’d long thought, but because they likely wanted to keep one eye attuned to the darkness belowdecks even at midday. They, like Tal, knew that fully developed night vision was something worth safeguarding.