What's pale white, has multiple heads and costs $450 a pound? In Japan, the rare hon-shimeji mushroom. Now, Swedish researchers have found it growing wild in the country's northern forests.

"There will undoubtedly be a lot of interest in Sweden, and definitely in Japan once these discoveries become known there," Henrik Sundberg, a student at the Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences at the University of Gothenburg, said in a release.

A paper on the discovery is to be published in the Swedish journal Svensk Mykologisk Tidskrift, or the Swedish Mycological Journal.

There are multiple species of mushrooms in the Lyophyllum family. One of the rarest and most sought after in Japan is Lyophyllum shimeji, called "hon-shimeji" or "true shimeji". It was previously believed that this fungus, with its distinctive multiple stalks, only in Asia.

But in 2008, a Japanese mycologist named Etsuko Harada visiting Sweden found a fungus similar to hon-shimeji in a pine heath in northern Sweden outside Skellefteå. Sundberg and colleagues were able to confirm that the northern Swedish fungus was identical to the prized Japanese mushroom.

Mushroom picking is a beloved activity in Sweden, but the connection between its prized mushrooms and those in Japan wasn't known until a decade ago, when researchers showed that the Swedish Tricholoma nauseosum was identical to the Japanese species Tricholoma matsutake. Since then, Japanese mushroom traders have combed Sweden's northern forests to find the Swedish matsutake.

The mushroom has now been found in both northern and central Sweden. Finds in Norway and Finland make it seem likely it will be found throughout the taiga belt of boreal forest all the way from Scandinavia to China and Japan, Sundberg says.

By Elizabeth Weise