Sunday, February 21 at 2:00 pm ~ Yarmouth Historical Society and the Maine Mycological Association are pleased to host Gertrude (Jimmy) McWilliams at the Yarmouth History Center on Sunday, February 21 at 2:00 pm.
The 1957 Audubon book Fungi was written and photographed by McWilliams, who has lived an extraordinary life by any standard. As a child growing up in England, she spent many hours gathering mushrooms in cow pastures with her parents for the table, which nurtured her deep passion and appreciation for the architectural wonder of fungi. Working in the forests of northern New York near her home in the 1950s, McWilliams took thousands of slides of mushrooms and slime molds. This work became the foundation for her book. Recognizing the historical value of her work, the New York Mycological Association recently held a special exhibition of McWilliams’ slides, and the New York Botanical Garden has placed a sample of her slides in a temperature controlled vault to preserve her mid-century slice of mycological history. We invite the public to meet Jimmy, learn about her experiences in England, Germany, and New York, and enjoy a selection of her fungi portraits.
