In Britain, the fungi with the tongue-twisting scientific name Gloeophyllum sepiarium are known as Conifer mazegills, while in North America their common name is Rusty-gilled polypore. I blogged about these same fungi, on a wooden railing on the local coastal path, two years ago (see Conifer mazegill, February 2019) but I couldn’t find them last year, mostly because the railing was too overgrown with bramble and ivy.

This year the contractors responsible for managing the vegetation along the path have been more ruthless in their cutting and strimming, and so the fungi have once again made an appearance. In 2019, the specimens I saw were very young and hadn’t developed their characteristic bracket-like structure so I thought it was worth posting about them again to show how marked the difference is.