Foothills Park after the rain

Every winter I hope to stumble across one of these—Hericium coralloides—on a hike in the foothills; this is the first in several years, thanks to the recent generous rains, I suppose. It is the loveliest of fungi. It does resemble its namesake coral, or to my eye a delicate calcite formation in a cavern. But in fact it is soft and rubbery, and supposedly quite delicious. Identification is pretty foolproof, so I would not hesitate to take one home for the skillet, were it not too beautiful to pick.

You can almost hear the vegetation slurping up the water, which gives the forest and chaparral a kind of radiance, even before many of the plants have leafed out.