Any of various fungi of the family Lycoperdaceae whose round fruiting body discharges a cloud of spores when mature

Usage examples of puffball.

Not a seashore, as would be normal, but the wall of water that would be the undersea, stretching up to the few small clouds like puffballs in the Drowned Land, here looking like large, softheaded pins, holding the wall erect and keeping the sea from flooding these two ocean-buried lands.

Julia turned Blackie around the last corner, and there the houses were, two in a long row of bioforms, pumpkins, beanstalks, squash, a Chinese lantern, a puffball, the layer of plastic that strengthened its inflated skin glinting slickly in the rain.

Not on a world where giant teddy-bear mounds became motile fangs and claws, fumbling tree-climbers turned their nostrils into drills, and cute fuzzy Puffballs slung poison-filled quills at curious investigators.

The sky was clear today, with only a few white puffballs of cloud floating here and there, and no threat of a storm.

They were stopped three times by policemen, once for driving only twenty miles an hour on the thruway, a second time for driving over eighty miles an hour, while a third police car overtook them with sirens shrieking because Sister Hyacinthe had seen skullcap and puffballs growing beside the thruway and parked to gather a few plants.

Julia turned Blackie around the last corner, and there the houses were, two in a long row of bioforms, pumpkins, beanstalks, squash, a Chinese lantern, a puffball, the layer of plastic that strengthened its inflated skin glinting slickly in the rain.

Sister Hyacinthe knelt beside the man, crushed the puffball over the unpleasant hole in his arm and carefully wrapped the warm comfrey poultice around the arm.

Puffballs are fungi, the only fungi the Indians ever trusted-the spores clot the blood-comfrey has allantoin in it.

The gi-i-wa puffball of the Mixtecs, the sacred mushroom known as teonancatl (divine flesh) by the Aztecs, the tree fungus of the Yurimagua of Peru, the hex potion ayahuasca distilled by the Zaparo from the banisteriopsis vine as described by Villavicencio (1858) - all can be said to produce alkaloid exudates similar, chemically, to that obtained from Atropa belladonna.

He dared to lift his head and look down, in time to see the avalanche reach the base of the couloir and make glittering puffballs as it buried the bergschrund.

There were puzzle trees, distorted cotton-candy jungles, the much smaller puffballs that Carlot had pointed out for him (“fisher jungles”), and greenery that was totally unfamiliar.

They weren't there when I settled down to sleep, but they were there when I woke up: a ring of morbid fruiting bodies - small black mushrooms or puffballs - already rotting and bursting open at the slightest movement, releasing their scarlet spores.

She was wearing a very expensive pink T-shirt, pinched from Maud at half-term, over which all her friends had written messages in biro, a puffball skirt, laddered tights and black clumpy stompers, and was now eating muesli out of a cup with a teaspoon.

Fungi, the group that includes mushrooms, molds, mildews, yeasts, and puffballs, were nearly always treated as botanical objects, though in fact almost nothing about them—how they reproduce and respire, how they build themselves—matches anything in the plant world.

Fungi are everywhere and come in many forms—as mushrooms, molds, mildews, yeasts, and puffballs, to name but a sampling—and they exist in volumes that most of us little suspect.