The first time Mahajabeen Padamsee stumbled across Entoloma hochstetteri in a New Zealand forest, she was happily startled. It was small, just a couple of inches tall, and she thought it seemed out of place. “I was like, ‘What are you doing here?’” Padamsee says. E. hochstetteri is a mushroom, and it’s blue. It’s really, really, really blue—almost unbelievably blue, saturated in a way more often associated with kids’ markers or mouth-staining candy than with fungi. Padamsee, a mycologist at Manaaki Whenua–Landcare Research in Auckland and curator of the NZ…
