Scratlee wood

I was up on the Downs on Saturday, near East Dean (West Sussex), exploring a triangle of woodland wedged between Wood Lea and Scratlee wood, just south of Charlton Forest.

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Fallen boughs and a windblown Beech tree held the promise of fungi; and I wasn't disappointed.

Although the woods were very dry up there on the Downs, this Ganoderma species was still looking fresh. I really must learn how to identify these to species. I think it's a spore size thing (unless there are galls from the Yellow Flat-footed Platypezid Fly Agathomyia wankowiczii present, which I always look for but never find).

This rotting bough was hosting a few fruit bodies of Wolf's Milk Lycogala sp.

I haven't sorted out how to identify these to species either, after getting thoroughly confused about the difference between L. terrestre and L. epidendrum last year (here).

This windblown Beech had delivered an impressive crop of oyster mushrooms Pleurotus sp.

... Unfortunately all very dried out.

They were growing in two distinct patches. This patch had turned tan and leathery; and every fruit body appeared to sprout from a separate stem. The edges of each fruit body rolled neatly inwards.

Whereas this small cluster were paler and all sprouting from a common base...

... and the edges appeared more uneven.

This leads me to speculate there may be two separate species here. But which?

Despite poring over the field guides, I can't seem to get my head around whether the Pleurotus are separable / identifiable in the field. I gather that the Oyster Mushroom Pleurotus ostreatus can be very variable and differences compared to other species are rather subtle... So if anyone would care to offer any advice, it would be most welcome!

Finally I spotted this little trio, growing up from a soil substrate in the centre of the path.

I assume the difference in cap colour is a sign of an 'hygrophanous' character. The gills were a dark chocolate brown colour. I also noted the stem was very brittle which I thought might indicate a brittlestem Psathyrella species. But the key to the Psathyrella in Funga Nordica is rather fierce and I don't think I'm feeling brave enough to attempt it today.

For the record
Date: 15 July 2017
Location: Woods on North Down, near East Dean (West Sussex)
Grid reference: SU8914

Mushroom in the bathroom

Look what popped up in our bathroom on Wednesday evening:

A lovely yellow mushroom! Sprouting out from our potted cactus.

A quick glimpse underneath revealed lemon yellow gills.

I couldn't find anything like it in the Collins photo guide (Sterry & Hughes) or the illustrated guide (Buczacki et al). But then spotted the Plantpot Dapperling Leucocoprinus birnbaumii in Phillips' Mushrooms.

It's a match!

Plantpot Dapperling is a tropical/subtropical species which can be found in Britain in heated greenhouses, or indoors situations like this. A little beauty!

I posted these photographs on the British Mycological Society Facebook page where this identification was confirmed by Richard Shotbolt.

For the record
Date: 12/07/2017
Location: Small Dole
Grid reference: TQ2112

Record entered into FRDBI 06/09/2018

Summer Fungi at Burton & Chingford Ponds

It hardly seemed like fungus-hunting weather at Burton and Chingford Ponds yesterday.

But I'd had a tip-off. Michael had led a Sussex Wildlife Trust members' walk around Burton Pond the day before and returned with this tantalising photograph of an oyster mushroom.

What a difference a day makes!

By the time I got there, the mushrooms were all dried out and stained yellow with age. The fruit bodies were hard and brittle. Snapping one off revealed a writhing mass of black-tipped maggots, chomping away on the dessicated flesh.

The maggots rather put me off taking a sample. And anyway, I thought it might be difficult obtaining some spores from the dried out gills. So I settled for taking a bunch of photographs.

This one shows some of the stems, fused together into a common base. But I don't think they're truly 'branching' in the way you'd expect from the Branching Oyster Pleurotus cornucopiae.

This photograph shows the stem a little better.

As you'd expect from an oyster mushroom, the gills are strongly decurrent (running down the stem); but the gills/ridges don't extend all the way down the stem. Again, I think this feature means it's unlikely to be P. cornucopiae.

But what is it? Having also consulted with Funga Nordica, I think the combination of pale flesh and summer fruiting mean it's likely to be the Pale Oyster P. pulmonarius. This species occurs on both living and dead deciduous wood, including birch (Betula), as it is here.

Continuing on, this standing dead tree was covered in swarms of King Alfred's Cakes Daldinia concentrica.

And I was delighted to come across this large mushroom, growing in parkland -type habitat, under some old oaks.

As you can just-about-make-out in the photograph, it had a large round bulge at the bottom – a volva – which had become partially hollowed-out and was providing a home to a very active family of woodlice.

The cap was this rather attractive olive-green colour.

And while the gills were still covered in the remnants of a partial veil (?) I could see no hint of a ring.

This leaves me in something of a quandary, as the mushroom matches many features of the Deathcap Amanita phalloides, but it doesn't have a 'pendulous ring' around the stem.

I wondered if it could be a Grisette Amanita vaginata. But a key feature of that species is its 'striate' (stripy) margin. And this mushroom doesn't have that.

I found a couple of younger specimens growing nearby, so I looked to see if those showed any signs of a 'pendulous' ring. But they didn't.

The partial veil's falling off in the wrong direction! Towards the cap margin, rather than the stem.

Note also the mottled lower stem – showing the same colouring as the cap. This is also a feature of A. phalloides. And the cap has a sweet and slightly vinegar-y smell to me, which the books say is also a feature of A. phalloides.

I think it probably is the Deathcap A. phalloides.

UPDATE 08/07/2017: I posted these pictures on the British Mycological Society Facebook page and Geoffrey Kibby was kind enough to confirm my identification. Success! 

Then I saw this Common Toad Bufo bufo. Hello!

Thought I'd give it a guest appearance in this fungus blog, given toads' long association with the mushroom kingdom!

One of the nice things about the walk around Burton & Chingford Ponds is the great variety of habitats it takes you past: woodland, heath, bogs and ponds. As you reach the furthest point from the car park at Burton Mill, the route goes through an area of pine plantation. And it was here I spotted a smattering of earthballs.

Earthballs are covered in the new book by Geoffrey Kibby, so I thought, I CAN DO THIS! (Other field guides have always left me a little confused as to how you separate the different species).

The earthballs were growing at the side of the path, under conifers, amongst leaf litter over very sandy soil.

The earthball seemed almost fused into the leaflitter by mycelia; the stem was almost absent. In the young fruit body the spore mass ('gleba') was white and just starting to flush a purplish-black colour. The surface of the fruit body was covered in tan-brown patches, broken up into an irregular pattern.

I think it probably is the common species, Common Earthball Scleroderma citrinum. But Kibby's book makes me think I should check the spore ornamentation to be sure. I don't think I can do this without mature spores, and without staining chemicals to highlight the ornamentation. Oh well, at least I know what to do next time.

In what proved to be a surprisingly fruitful trip for a dry day in July, I found a few little mushrooms growing at the side of the footpath, on sandy soil.

They had crowded gills, which were a pale mousy-brown colour.

The caps were quite conical and rounded at the top (without a discernable 'umbo'). The cap colour was a sort of non-descript beige, overlain with tan speckling (veil remnants?).

I think it might be a Psathyrella species. I'll try and get a spore print and see where that gets me.

I also found another earthball, this time growing in the heathy grassland near the Black Bog. This one had more obvious 'patches' on the surface.

I assume the spores had just recently matured, as the gleba was this glistening blue-black colour.

I'll see if I can get some spores out of this one...

UPDATE 08/07/2017: 

Geoffrey Kibby's book explains that spore ornamentation is a key identification feature in the genus Scleroderma – the Earthballs. Spores are typically spiny and can also be covered in a network of ridges, in which case they are described as 'reticulate'. This graphic from Michael Kuo's mushroomexpert.com site shows the different kinds of ornamentation you might see in Scleroderma species.

Image reproduced from www.mushroomexpert.com. © Michael Kuo

This is the best image I've been able to get of the spores from my collection.

You can see they've got some impressive spikes on them, but I can't get the image clear enough to tell if the spores are reticulate or not. 

So, there we go. I'm stuck again. 

For the record
Date: 8 July 2017
Location: Burton & Chingford Ponds
Grid ref: SU9717

P. pulmonarius, D. concentrica and A. phalloides entered into FRDBI 06/09/2018

Copping out

I went to visit a new site today: Broadmare Common, just south of Henfield in West Sussex.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover an intepretation board on my arrival, explaining the history of this area of common land. From the 17th century to the early 20th century it was an industrial area for the digging of clay used to make bricks. It's now managed by the Henfield Conservation Volunteers for people and wildlife to enjoy.

The common boasts a reasonably extensive area of wet woodland and many small ponds, so I thought this might be a good spot to find some fungi during this dry month of June.

There's lots of this sort of thing, so I was glad I had my boots on.

I found a few different ascomycetes and bracket fungi growing around the ponds, plus loads of myxomycetes (slime moulds) from the genus Stemonitis, which I'll come back to later. But it was at the edge of this pond that I found my one and only mushroom for the day.

It was a small, pale and delicate mushroom, growing on what I assumed to be a willow twig. It was very near the edge of the pond, where the ground is probably permanently wet.

I wouldn't normally attempt to identify a little thing like this, but in several respects it seemed quite distinctive, so I thought I would have a go.

The cap was topped with a neat little tan umbo (pointy bit). The cap itself was pale, translucent, and pleated – forming radial ridges. Underneath, the gills were a darker mousy brown; the colour was visible through the translucent cap cuticle, giving the cap the appearance of being mousy brown to about 2/3 of its radius. The gills appeared to be free: attached to the cap, around the stipe; not abutting the stipe itself. The stipe was the same translucent white as the cap cuticle, and tan coloured right at the foot of the stipe, above the white mycelial strands which anchored the mushroom to its twig.

I started off down completely the wrong track, thinking it was a Bonnet mushroom – one of the Mycena or Marasmius species. But the brown gills meant it must be something different. I eventually realised that this mushroom belongs in one of the Inkcap genera. I'd been fooled by that pale margin, without the slightest hint of deliquescing inkiness; but not all Inkcaps deliquesce, of course.

I flicked through the Collins Fungi Guide, looking for species matching mine which would be found on twigs.

Coprinellus subdisseminatus seemed like an excellent match, but I thought I'd best check its microscopic features against the description in Funga Nordica, to be sure.

This is where I've got stuck. The genus Coprinellus seems to comprise a lot of really rather similar mushrooms. And I wasn't sure I'd managed to find any of the things I was looking for down the microscope.

The first thing I noticed, aside from the brown spores, were these spherical things. What the heck were they?

After much poring over the keys in Funga Nordica, I came to the conclusion they might be 'velar spherocysts' – round things which are found on the cap of some Coprinellus species. 

They did seem to occur primarily in the cap (which I should possible refer to as the 'pileipellis'):

According to Funga Nordica, only some species of Coprinellus have 'velar spherocysts'. C. subdisseminatus is one of the species which is "without velar spherocysts". So I guess my mushroom isn't that after all...

The problem that I had then is, in order to ascertain what species of Coprinellus my mushroom actually is, I needed to get a good look at the cystidia (weird structures which can be found on the surface of the mushroom – no one knows what they're for).

There are different names for the cystidia, depending where they're found on the surface of the mushroom. In Coprinellus mushrooms, it seems the ones you need to look out for are:

• cheilocystidia - cystidia on the edges of the gills
• pleurocystidia – cystidia on the faces of the gills
• pileocystidia – cystidia on the surface of the cap
• caulocystidia – cystidia on the stipe

Funga Nordica also talks about 'sclerocystidia' but that word's not in the glossary and I have no idea what it means.

So, I found some stuff.

There was this:

I guess those rolling-pin type shapes could be pileocystidia.

There was also this:

I have no idea what that is, but it's very pointy.

And I thought I could possibly detect some cystidia here:

... and here:

But, in conclusion, finding cystidia on tiny Coprinellus mushrooms is really hard and I still have no idea what species this is.

THE END

For the record
Date: 24/06/2017
Location: Broadmare Common
Grid reference: TQ216150 (site centroid)

Do my eyes deceive me?

Quick mooch around the woods after work today and was pleased to find a mushroom which looked new-to-me.

When I looked closely, there were a few of these mushrooms scattered over a patch a metre or so wide, and a couple growing in a little clump. But most of the others were looking very old and dried up.

The first thing I noticed was the deep depression at the centre of the cap.

It was growing up through leaf-litter and I decided I'd better dig it up for a closer look, revealing this tough, fibrous and twisted stem, rooted in the ground. At the base, white mycelia disappeared into the soil.

Stem and cap are a tan colour, with dusky pink gills.

I was pretty sure these features put me in the realms of the Laccaria – The Deceivers. The key to the Laccaria in Funga Nordica is only three pages long. Joy!

One of the features the key asks me to look at is the 'basidia'. This is a new term for me: basidia are spore-bearing structures, as illustrated by this handy image from wikipedia.

This is really hard! Especially when I haven't got any stains yet, which means everything just looks white. But I think the blurry structure in the middle of this photo might just be a 4-spored basidia.

I also checked out the spores, which look pleasingly spiky and spherical, like this:

Am reasonably confident all this takes me to The Deceiver Laccaria laccata.

For the record
Date: 12/06/2017
Location: Horton Wood, Small Dole
Grid reference: TQ208127 (site centroid)

Record entered into FRDBI 06/09/2018

Sordid White

I passed these mushrooms on my walk to work. They were growing in a grassy area, under trees, and next to an old stump. There were a few little clumps poking up through the grass, in a patch a couple of metres wide. They weren't far from my office, at Woods Mill, so I decided I'd go back at lunchtime for a closer look.

Preliminary investigations revealed a dusting of brown spores on the caps beneath the uppermost mushroom.

This put paid to my first theory – that they might be Fairy Ring Champignon Marasmius oreades – because they evidently don't have a white spore print.

The most striking feature of these mushrooms was their growing habit: sprouting up in a clump and strongly fused together at the bottom. The other thing I noted was their brittle stems which made an audible snapping sound when even slightly bent; and no ring around the stems.

Flicking through the Collins Complete (photographic) Guide that I now try and carry around with me wherever I go, I couldn't immediately see any candidates which matched what I was seeing. But then the photographs in that book are almost all taken looking down upon the cap, which doesn't give you much to go on when trying to match other features such as the gills and stem.

I took a specimen and resolved to investigate further, after work.

Once home, I took my copy of Mushrooms by Roger Phillips off the shelf and flicked through it, looking for something to match what I'd seen. When I got to this page – the Psathyrella – I reckoned I must be pretty close.

Feeling cocky, I then turned to Funga Nordica, to see if I could key out my mushroom. But I got stuck trying to determine if it had pleurocystidia or not, as I wasn't sure what I should be looking for.

I did have some success measuring the spores. I think these are about 8 microns in length.

And – not very easy to see when they're just mounted in water – but I think these are cheilocystidia growing along the gill edge. Their skittle shape, which you may or may not be able to make out in this photo, is described as 'utriform' in mycology-speak.
 

I didn't quite manage to get through the keys to the Psathyrella – they include some tests I can't do because I haven't got the right kit (e.g. ammonia). But I think my mushrooms are a good match for Pale Brittlestem Psathyrella candolleana.

I was unsure at first because Funga Nordica describes the cap as "dark reddish brown, becoming ochraceous brown, at maturity fading to ochre with yellow, grey, purple or violet tinges" and I don't think my mushroom is any of those colours! However, it goes on to describe the cap as "hygrophanous, drying sordid white or grey". Well, I guess you could describe the cap as "sordid white". Although that seems an extraordinarily odd description for a colour. The colour of Miss Havisham's dress, perhaps, after all those years shut up in her mansion?

I couldn't see any trace of a veil, but I think these mushrooms were a couple of days old by the time I got to them, and the recent heavy rain could have washed this away. I noticed the fresher caps have a slight sparkle to them, when you get them up close; I don't know if that's indicative of anything. And the margin is faintly striate.

The habitat and time of year also seems right for P. candolleana, as Funga Nordica describes it as occuring "in rich deciduous forests, parks and gardens on or around stumps...; spring to autumn."

So, P. candolleana seems quite likely. But I wouldn't like to say for certain as Psathyrella seems a more complicated genus than the field guides would have you believe.

For the record
Date: 07/06/2017
Location: Hoe Wood
Grid reference: TQ217136