By the seventeenth-century poet William Browne, bard of "Britannia's Pastorals" and "The Shepherd's Pipe," the mushroom is thus alluded to:
"Down in a valley by a forest's side,
Near where the crystal Thames rolls on her waves,
I saw a mushroom stand in haughty pride
As if the lilies grew to be his slaves."
Then, after praising the daisy, violet, and other flowers whose beauty was overpowered by the fungus, he thus concludes a much-admired sonnet:
"These, with a many more, methought complained
That Nature should those needless things produce,
Which not alone the sun from others gained,