Mushrooms in the kitchen

The washing up got interrupted by these little beauties this morning, when I noticed them fruiting in a plant pot on the window sill.

It's not the first time I've found mushrooms cohabiting with my house plants. Dedicated readers may remember that dapper little fellow in the bathroom. But these ones turned out to be a proper puzzle.

Underneath the plum-coloured top, I saw these mushrooms had yellow gills. The only species I could think of that would match that descriptions was Plums and Custard Tricholomopsis rutilans. But the habitat wasn't right. And these seemed altogether more elegant.

Look at that peachy little cap... Gorgeous!

I eventually had to tear myself away from the ID books and head off to work, where it just so happened I had a meeting lined up with Nick Aplin and Martin Allison from Sussex Fungus Group. They pointed me in the direction of the genus Gymnopilus, and – specifically – a rather beguiling alien called Gymnopilus dilepis, the Magenta Rustgill.

I quickly found a description of this species on the first-nature website, here, and Malcolm Storey has shared macro and micro images of his collection from Berkshire, here. The species doesn't feature in all of my fungus books, but there is a nice description in Andy Overall's new 'Fungi - Mushrooms & Toadstools of parks, gardens, heaths and woodlands' alongside a photo of some fresh specimens which look very much like the mushrooms growing in my kitchen.

A feature of G. dilepis which separates it from T. rutilans is an "indistinct" (Treu, 1998) or "fragile sometimes ephemeral stem ring" (from the first-nature website) which I can see – very feintly! – on these mushrooms. In this picture you can also see the reddish-brown colouration to the base of the stem. Another difference is spore colour, which in G. dilepis is yellowish brown; I am awaiting a spore print, as I type!

UPDATE 16/08/18 - And here's the cinnamon-y, yellowish-brown spore print.

For some reason the spores were washing around all over the shop when I tried to look at them, but I did just about manage to make out the warty surface to the spores. The size is also right: about 7 x 4.5 microns.

Andy Overall (2017) describes the habitat for this species as, "on fermenting woodchip mulch in parks, open woodland, gardens or cemeteries, or among compost and mulch in greenhouses." Well, that sounds more like it. I repotted my Money Plant (Crassula ovata?) a year or so ago, in peat-free compost, and it lives on a sunny kitchen window sill which must have created the right conditions for G. dilepis to fruit, after I gave it a good soaking the other day.

I must have caught it just as it was just starting to fruit. Over the course of today the caps have expanded to be almost flat – showing off more of their orangey background.

Alick Henrici (2002) wrote in an article in the journal Field Mycology that this species was first recorded in the UK in 1995. Looking on the Fungus Records Database of Britain and Ireland, it looks like there are only four previous records for Sussex, all from Stedham Common, West Sussex, between 2003 and 2006. So what's it doing in my kitchen!?


References

Henrici, A., 2002, Notes and Records, Field Mycology, 3 (1) - January 2002, URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1468-1641(10)60126-0
Overall, A., 2017, Fungi - Mushrooms & Toadstools of parks, gardens, heaths and woodlands
Treu, R., 1998, Macrofungi in Oil Palm Plantations of South East Asia, Mycologist, 12 (1) - February 1998, URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0269-915X(98)80095-5

With thanks to Andy Overall for helping me to source these references. And writing one of them!

For the record
Date: 15 August 2018
Location: Small Dole, West Sussex
Grid reference: TQ2112

Specimen retained (ref. CMB00006).
Record entered into FRDBI 07/09/2018