Tag Archives: autumn fungi

288/366 Little Japanese umbrella

14 Wednesday Oct 2020

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I didn’t know until I read the entry for the Pleated inkcap (Parasola plicatilis) on the First Nature website that this fungus is also known as the Little Japanese umbrella but it’s easy to see how its delicate pleated structure would suggest the comparison. These little beauties are a one-day wonder and you have to be up early to appreciate them at their best. Here, we have photos looking directly down at the cap, a side shot, and then looking up from ground level at the underside of the cap. A perfect tiny parasol!

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331/365 Groovy bonnets

27 Wednesday Nov 2019

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Finally some fungi I can identify with confidence because, as Pat O’Reilly explains on the First Nature website,

Cap colour is rarely of much help when you are struggling to identify a Mycena, as they vary so much with age, location, humidity and growing substrate. If you look closely at the stem of a Grooved Bonnet you will see that it has longitudinal striations, whereas other common bonnet mushrooms have smooth stems.

So, the striated stems you can, hopefully, see in my second photo below prove that these lovely little bonnets I found growing in a tree in the grounds of a local church are … taaa daas! … Grooved bonnets (Mycena polygramma).

287/365 Hygrocybe, but which

14 Monday Oct 2019

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191014 hygrocybe (1)

Waxcaps are my favourite fungi but they can be difficult to identify. Sometimes the colour helps, but there are several species of a reddish-orange hue. As these have quite a coarse upper surface on the caps, I thought at first that they might be Fibrous waxcaps (Hygrocybe intermedia) but, as these were at Cosmeston Lakes Country Park, I’m wondering if they might be Hygrocybe calciphilia, which are smaller and grow on calcareous grassland. I really need to check their features more thoroughly in future. What I do know for sure is how lovely they are!

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285/365 Mousepee pinkgill

12 Saturday Oct 2019

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What’s in a name? That which we call a Mousepee pinkgill
By any other name would still smell like mouse pee!
(with apologies to William Shakespeare)

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Truth be known, I have no idea what mouse pee smells like (and these fungi had been rained on for several days so the smell may well have dissipated) but I’m fairly sure that is what these fungi are. The greenish stem is a bit of a giveaway, and these are definitely not Parrot waxcaps, which are the only other green-stemmed fungi I know (though that, in itself, doesn’t mean there aren’t others).

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You can read up on the Mousepee pinkgill (Entoloma incanum) on the most excellent First Nature website here.

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Butter cap anyone?

28 Sunday Oct 2018

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Here’s a fungus I can actually identify! This is the Butter cap, a name that’s so much easier to say than its scientific name Rhodocollybia butyracea.

181028 Butter cap fungus (2)

Thanks to the most excellent First Nature website, I can tell you that Rhodocollybia is from rhodo, meaning ‘pink’ (a reference to the pinkish tinge of the mushroom’s gills), and collybia means ‘small coin’, while the epithet butyracea means ‘buttery’ (but not in taste – it’s a reference to the greasiness of the cap).

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Dead but full of life

22 Monday Oct 2018

Posted by in autumn, fungi, nature, trees

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181022 fungi on log (1)

This tree may be dead but it’s teeming with life.

I’m sure it’s chock full of a huge variety of bugs and beetles, slugs and centipedes, and many other mini-beasties, but what caught my eye was the number of different types of fungi it was supporting.

As well as several species of gilled mushrooms, there were also various intriguing brackets, some oozing golden droplets, and a wonderfully vibrant orange Lycogala species of slime mould. Fungi may often be difficult to identify but they never cease to amaze me.

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Lawyer’s wig

19 Wednesday Sep 2018

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I think you can see how this shaggy little fungus got one of its common names, Lawyer’s wig, as it so well resembles the wigs lawyers wear in court. This is Coprinus comatus, also, not surprisingly, known as the Shaggy inkcap. Coprinus means ‘living on dung’ but this fungus really just prefers very rich soil with lots of decaying plant matter. These are usually found in groups of up to 20 individuals, and I found this little group of five along the edge of a woodland path, a fairly typical habitat.

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Edit: My fungi friend Graham very kindly pointed out that I had mis-identified my initial find but, luckily, I saw some real Shaggy inkcaps today, so I have changed the photos above to show those.

The confusion species, which my initial photos (below) showed, was actually the Hare’s-foot inkcap (Coprinopsis lagopus). Perhaps you can see why I was confused by all that shagginess!

Bute oysters

15 Saturday Sep 2018

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180915 Oyster fungi (1)

I called this post ‘Bute oysters’ (because I found them during a wander in Cardiff’s Bute Park last week) but maybe that should be beaut oysters because there’s no denying these Oyster fungi are sculptural beauties.

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And I called them oysters but I’m not actually sure what they are – mostly likely some type of Oyster (Pleurotus sp.) or Oysterling (Crepidotus sp.). I gave up trying to identify fungi species a year or so back when I realised that you really need a microscope to have any chance with most of them and I decided I didn’t want to go down that route.

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I still enjoy looking at them and admiring their beauty though.

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