spalting
n.— «Wood left on the ground for several months, he said, will undergo “a startling transformation and develop a spidery network of black lines.” This process, called spalting, “is due to special fungi that live in the ground.”» —“Artists work in oil and wood” by Rebecca Bailey in Carrboro Herald-Sun (Durham, N.C.) Sept. 29, 2005. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
What if, instead of being an inanimate object, a dictionary were alive? That’s the idea behind a lavishly illustrated new children’s book called The Dictionary Story (Bookshop|Amazon) by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston. This is part of a...