Tag Archives: wood-rotting fungi

Birch polypore

30 Friday Jan 2026

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It’s been a very long time since I blogged about this fascinating fungus, Birch polypore (Piptoporus betulinus), also known as Razorstrop fungus, because, as I explained in An essential piece of traveller’s kit (8 February 2016), barbers once used the hard surface of this fungus to sharpen their cut-throat razors.

Birch polypore is a rotter, literally; its powers of decomposition are strong, mostly acting on the wood of dead Birches (Betulinus species) but, as Pat O’Reilly writes in Fascinated by Fungi, it may also ‘be parasitic on weakened birches’. I found this lovely specimen feeding on a dead Birch in a Cardiff park earlier this week.

Tufts of sulphur

23 Friday Dec 2022

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During my recent walks to marvel at the autumn colours of the Beautiful Beeches of Cwm George in Dinas Powys, I noticed that one of the Beech trees had, at some time in the past, succumbed to the ravages of time and weather and, where once a majestic giant stood tall, there was now a large, crumbling stump.

221223 sulphur tuft (1)

As well as a thick covering of fallen leaves, the greens of moss, ivy and a thin clump of grass, the stump was providing a home – and food – to fungi, a thriving colony of Sulphur tuft (Hypholoma fasciculare), one of our most common wood-rotters. I’m sure this is a fungus almost all my followers will have seen.

221223 sulphur tuft (2)

Dead man’s fingers

29 Friday Jan 2021

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210129 dead man's fingers
Be afraid! A dead man is poking his rotting blackened fingers up from the leaf litter, reaching for the passing ankles of unwary walkers.

Nah, not really, though the ‘fingers’ – really the fungal fruiting bodies of the aptly named Dead man’s fingers (Xylaria polymorpha) – can look rather spooky when first encountered.

As the First Nature website explains, these wood-rotting fungi play an important environmental role:

they specialise in consuming neither the softish cellulose nor the much tougher lignin but rather the polysaccharides … As a result, when these and various other ascomycetous fungi have consumed what they can of a dead stump the remainder is a nutrient-rich soft mess that insects and other small creatures are able to feed upon.