In dry years, "mushrooms could be in all places round you, and invisible at the same time," she says-hiding in soil and waiting for rain. "Oooh, yay, yay, yay," she says gleefully as she carves it from the soil with a flip-out blade. "In your own yard you will discover one thing that has never been seen earlier than," says Else Vellinga, a mycologist at the University of California, Berkeley. This tiny pocket of trees within the Santa Ana Mountains could be its excellent habitat, he thinks-and now may very well be the very best time ever to truly discover it. In February, a number of weeks after the latest rain, Starwood crunches by thick oak leaf duff within the low hills of mountains near L.A. About a hundred and fifty folks attended a recent morning stroll at the Los Angeles Mycological Society’s annual honest to see mushrooms popping up in city parks and sidewalk cracks.