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Native to temperate forests across East Asia, Europe, and North America, Lion’s Mane grows on hardwoods like beech and oak.

It appears in East Asian cuisine, historically consumed as both food and tonic. Modern cultivation began in the 20th century, making it widely available beyond wild foraging.

Originating on the Tibetan Plateau and highlands of China, Nepal. It’s been prized for centuries in Tibetan and Chinese traditional nutrition and royal courts. Demand surged globally in the late 20th century, prompting conservation concerns and tighter regional harvesting controls. Today, most consumer products use cultivated analogs due to rarity and sustainability issues.

Chaga is a sterile conk that forms on birch trees across boreal forests - Siberia, Scandinavia, the Baltics, and North America. It occasionally served as a coffee substitute in resource-scarce periods (e.g., WWII Finland). Commercial interest expanded in the 20th–21st centuries with improved harvesting and hot-water extraction.

Revered in Chinese culture as lingzhi (靈芝), Reishi appears in imperial art as a symbol of longevity and virtue. It naturally grows as a lacquered, kidney-shaped bracket on hardwood stumps across East Asia and beyond. Historical texts in Traditional Chinese Nutrition describe it as a superior herb; similar esteem exists in Japanese (mannentake) and Korean traditions. Modern strain selection and cultivation in the 1970s–1990s made reishi widely accessible outside elite circles.

Native to East Asia, shiitake has been gathered in China and Japan for centuries and was first described in Song-dynasty texts (10th–13th c.) as being grown on hardwood logs. The name comes from Japan’s shii tree (Castanopsis) + “take” (mushroom). Modern log and sawdust cultivation spread worldwide after WWII, making shiitake one of the most widely grown edible mushrooms today.

Called “hen of the woods,” maitake grows at the base of old oaks and maples in Japan, China, Europe and North America. In Japan’s Edo period it was so prized that stories say it could be traded for its weight in silver - people “danced” upon finding it (hence “maitake,” “dancing mushroom”). Commercial cultivation took off in Japan in the late 20th century and then globally.

A colorful bracket fungus found on downed wood across the world, turkey tail has been used for centuries in East Asian traditions - known as yún zhī (雲芝) in China and kawaratake (カワラタケ) in Japan. Its layered “tail” rings inspired both its English name and the Latin “versicolor.” Modern research interest ramped up in Japan and China in the 1970s, leading to standardized extracts studied for wellness support.

First described in the United States in 1893, this sweet-almond-scented mushroom later gained fame in Brazil in the 1960s–70s, where it was popularly called “cogumelo do sol” (sun mushroom). It was exported to Japan as “himematsutake” and widely cultivated; for years it was marketed under the name Agaricus blazei Murill, though today most experts recognize the cultivated “Royal Sun” strain as A. subrufescens.

Native to grasslands of Europe and North America, Agaricus bisporus was first farmed at scale in the Paris mushroom caves in the 17th–18th centuries. Early cultivated caps were brown (what we now call cremini/portobello). In the 1920s, Pennsylvania growers selected a natural white mutation that stored well and looked cleaner—this “white button” strain quickly became the global supermarket standard.

A shelf-like mushroom that grows on hardwoods across East and Southeast Asia, long known in Chinese cuisine as mù’ěr (木耳) and in Japan as kikurage. Historically dried and rehydrated for soups and stir-fries, it’s prized for its springy texture rather than flavor. Modern sawdust-bag cultivation scaled up in the mid-20th century, making wood ear a staple export from China and a common pantry ingredient worldwide.