Eugene-based painter uses her background in iconography to showcase Oregon’s environment

Last spring, Olga Volchkova spotted a candy cane plant in the Oregon woods, near the coast. In late September, she went back and found 10 matsutake mushrooms.

The candy cane flower can’t make its own food, so it takes sugar from the pines through a fungal network beneath the forest floor, Volchkova said. Where it blooms in spring, matsutake follows in fall…