HAVE you seen the Mushroom Man? No? Well, have you looked in the Secret Garden? It’s a real place, you know, a half-hidden community garden at the corner of Linden Street and Broadway, in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

The Mushroom Man is real, too. His name is Kendall Morrison — he’s 47 years old and semiretired from the publishing business — and on any given weekend, you’re likely to find him in a shady grove of silver maples, cultivating eight varieties of mushrooms.

You might not be able to tell right away what Mr. Morrison is doing. He may be wielding a hand drill, for instance, boring holes into a salvaged oak log. Or he may be pounding inchlong dowels into the wood with a mallet, each little peg impregnated with shiitake mushroom spawn.

“We started right around November,” Mr. Morrison said, referring to his 15 volunteers, “and we haven’t stopped. As long as we can work back there, we worked. Even when there was snow on the ground.”