Polyporaceae
Ganoderma lucidum
Reishi · Ling zhi · Lingzhi
- Kingdom
- Fungi — not a plant
- Part used
- whole
- Native range
- Temperate regions worldwide, on hardwood stumps; the material in trade is almost entirely cultivated
- Morphology
- A bracket fungus with a kidney-shaped cap, varnished deep red-brown with a paler margin, growing on dead or dying hardwood. Woody and inedible, and used as a decoction or extract rather than a food.
What is in it
Evidence
Cochrane has reviewed it as an adjunct in cancer treatment and found the evidence insufficient to justify use as a first-line treatment, with some signal for immune parameters. Trial quality is generally poor.
Safety
Generally well tolerated. Reports of hepatotoxicity, including a death associated with powdered preparation. Antiplatelet activity is reported. Quality and species identity in the supplement market are poorly controlled.
Interactions: Additive bleeding risk with anticoagulants and antiplatelets; Possible additive effect with antihypertensives
Regulatory: Permitted as a listed medicine ingredient in Australia.
How the traditions classify it
Three systems, rating the same plant. Where they disagree, none of them is correcting the others — they are separate frameworks that arrived at their categories independently.
Historical use
Depicted in Chinese art for two thousand years as an emblem of longevity and imperial favour, and rare enough in the wild to have been treated as an auspicious omen. Reliable cultivation dates only from the 1970s.
Recorded as history and attributed where possible. Long use establishes that a plant was widely used, not that it worked, and not that it was safe.
Worth knowing
Reishi is in this collection to make a point about its own boundaries: it is not a plant, and several of the most important items in the Chinese materia medica are not plants either.
A herbarium in the strict sense holds pressed plant specimens. Excluding fungi on that basis would misrepresent the traditions this section describes — Chinese practice uses Ganoderma, Poria, Cordyceps and others without regarding them as a separate category, and neither did European practice, which used ergot and puffballs.
So the collection records the kingdom where it is not Plantae, and says so on the entry. The alternative is a tidy definition that quietly deletes part of the subject.
Two naming problems came out of checking it, and the second one matters commercially.
Mycologists almost universally place Ganoderma in its own family, Ganodermataceae. GBIF and several other backbones lump it into Polyporaceae. This entry follows its stated authority and notes that most mushroom references will say otherwise.
Far more consequential: the reishi used in East Asia is very largely not Ganoderma lucidum. True G. lucidum is a European species. The cultivated Asian material was described as a distinct species, G. lingzhi, in 2012, and GBIF currently treats that name as a synonym of G. sichuanense. So a supplement labelled Ganoderma lucidum is quite likely a different organism from the one on the label, and a good deal of the published research inherits the same ambiguity.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.