Stinkhorn

  "What is that?" Tom asked. We were working in our meadow clearing weeds and limbs.

 I knew immediately but I couldn't think of the name. "Skunk ...". No, it wasn't Skunk cabbage. I went back to work carrying limbs and stepped around the intruder. It stood like a tiny, bright red and wet flag at our feet, impressively vermillion and erect as we moved to the side. It reminded me of a dog's penis.

 I continued to work and then it came to me. Not "skunk" but "stink". Stinkhorn.

 We've had them before in a flower bed where an old stump was rotting.

 It's no surprise to see that they're fungi in the Phallaceae family. This one is probably mutinus elegans. I wasn't the first to think they looked like a penis.

 And smell? Oh, do they smell. They have the smell of something rotten.

 I suppose it is because they are so distinctive and so brightly colored and not easily missed that they were the first fungus described in North America. Apparently British missionary John Bannister wrote of one growing in Virginia is 1679.

 It wasn't scientifically named until 1856.

 A friend of mine says her father  always called them "Dead Man's Finger Fungus".

 Here's a wider view ...