The Living Library
Sixteen organisms, one body of work
Ten mushrooms and fungi, six microalgae — each with its own page: what it is, what it is known for, and the part it plays at GaiaTara.
Mushrooms & fungi
Sterile incubation rooms, wood and grain substrates, measured humidity and fresh air.
A dark, cracked conk that grows slowly on living birch in the cold forests of Siberia, Northern Europe and the Himalayan belt.
Long-term research
A cascade of white icicle-like spines, growing like a frozen waterfall on hardwood.
First cultivation
Lacquered, fan-shaped and deep red, Reishi has been recorded in Asian herbal texts for over two thousand years, where it carried names meaning “mushroom of immortality”.
In R&D
Brilliant orange clubs grown in sterile glass jars under controlled light and humidity — the most laboratory-native organism in our portfolio, and the most photogenic.
First cultivation
Soft, layered fans in pearl, grey, gold and pink.
In R&D
The dark-capped mushroom that built the modern speciality mushroom market.
In R&D
A thick ivory stem under a small tan cap — dense, meaty and increasingly the chef's substitute for scallop and steak.
In R&D
Known in Japan as the “dancing mushroom” — overlapping grey-brown fronds that grow in clusters at the base of oak.
In R&D
Concentric bands of brown, rust, cream and blue-grey fanning across fallen wood — the most visually beautiful fungus in the range.
In R&D
A translucent white bloom, almost coral-like, known across China for a thousand years as a dessert ingredient and a beauty food.
In R&DMicroalgae
Photobioreactors and illuminated systems — the palette turns from earth to water.
A spiral blue-green filament, harvested from alkaline lakes long before it was ever cultivated — from Lake Chad to the lakes of the Valley of Mexico.
In R&D
A single-celled green alga with a cell wall so tough it must be broken before the body can use it — a small engineering problem that took decades to solve commercially.
In R&D
A green alga that turns deep blood-red when stressed by light — the colour change is the product.
In R&D
A wall-less alga that thrives in brine so salty almost nothing else survives — the reason some salt lakes run pink.
In R&DA tiny marine alga at the base of the ocean food chain, now grown in closed systems as a plant-based marine lipid platform.
In R&D
Small green cells that grow joined in neat groups of four — robust, fast and unusually tolerant of difficult water.
In R&D