The free mushroom advice service in Berlin

The Berlin botanic garden houses the herbarium registered internationally under the letter B — founded in 1819, the largest in Germany, and holding more than three million eight hundred thousand preserved specimens. It covers every group, from flowering plants and ferns to mosses, liverworts, algae, and fungi and lichens.

Attached to the same institution, however, is something a herbarium does not do: a free mushroom advice service for the public. It runs at the Botanikschule, in room E05 at Unter den Eichen 5 in Berlin, and the institution goes as far as describing how to find the entrance — about fifty metres towards Rathaus Steglitz, by the grey bicycle racks. The consultation costs nothing.

The rules for bringing specimens in are phrased the way they are phrased by someone who has seen what people bring. Fruit bodies must be fresh, complete, and actually collected by the person asking — never a lookalike picked up on the way in place of what really went into the pan. The picking is carried in an air-permeable basket, not a plastic bag. Species are kept apart, so that fragments of one do not mix into another.

The limit of the service is set out separately, and it is the most important sentence on the page. Photographs of found mushrooms may be e-mailed, but nobody will authorise eating anything on that basis. A photograph does not show smell, the texture of the flesh, the reaction to bruising or the base of the stipe — and without those, some identifications stay guesswork.

The contact details work all year: pilzberatung@bo.berlin and the telephone (030) 838 64751, with the institution warning that the line is not staffed every day.

A photograph is not enough for a culinary decision

Berlin's free advisory service at the Botanic Garden requires the complete, fresh collection. The consultant examines cap, gills or pores, stem and stem base, odour and changes after handling; a photograph omits part of that evidence and cannot clear a mushroom for eating. If a death cap is found in a mixed basket, the official guidance advises discarding the entire batch because fragments may have transferred. Consultation dates are seasonal and should be checked before travelling. In a suspected poisoning, the appropriate contact is Berlin's poison information centre on 030 19240 or emergency number 112, not the advisory-service queue.