Apricot Jelly Identification Guide

First impressions and setting

Apricot Jelly announces itself by colour. On a gravelly bank beside a forest track in a mountain conifer forest, in late summer, you catch a glimpse of something salmon-pink, translucent and glistening pushing up out of the compacted soil. It is not a cap on a stalk and it is not a bracket. It looks more like a curled tongue, a rolled leaf, a spatula or a wonky funnel that has been split open down one side, three to ten centimetres tall and sometimes much larger, standing upright or leaning out of the ground.

The habitat is a strong clue in its own right. This species is characteristically found on disturbed, mineral-rich ground rather than on a visible log: road cuts, path edges, gravel banks, ditch sides, the scraped margins of forestry tracks, and open patches in montane spruce and fir forest. Colonies are often gregarious, with several fruitbodies within a metre and occasional loose clumps fused at the base.

Reading the shape and the two surfaces

Pick one up carefully and turn it in the light.

Overall form. The fruitbody is spathulate, ear-shaped, tongue-shaped or funnel-shaped, and the crucial detail is that the funnel is always split from the rim down to the base on one side, so the structure is really a sheet rolled into a cone rather than a closed cup. The rim is entire to gently wavy or lobed, and it is thin and slightly translucent so that light passes through the edge.

Colour. Rosy salmon, apricot, pinkish-orange, coral or a reddish flesh tone, often paler and more translucent at the margin and deeper toward the base. Held up against the sky, a fruitbody glows. The colour does not change on handling.

Texture. Firmly gelatinous. This is not a soft, wobbly jelly that collapses when squeezed; it is elastic and rubbery, with real resistance, and it springs back after you compress it. Bend the rim and it flexes without tearing.

The fertile surface. This is where careful looking pays off. The spore-producing surface is the outer, convex, lower face of the funnel, and it is smooth, sometimes with a very faint whitish bloom or a slightly waxy sheen when fully mature. The inner, concave, upper face is sterile, smoother and often glossier. There are no gills, no pores, no spines and no veins anywhere. If you are seeing ribs or wrinkles, you are probably looking at a different fungus.

Base, flesh and cut surfaces

Excavate the base rather than snapping it off. The fruitbody narrows downward into a whitish to pale pinkish, stem-like, rooting extension that often runs three to five centimetres into the soil. Follow it and, in most collections, you will find it attached to a fragment of buried, well-rotted conifer wood: a root, a chunk of an old stump, a buried branch. Establishing that connection is worth the digging, because the apparently terrestrial habit of this species is one of the things that confuses people.

Slice a fruitbody vertically. The flesh is uniform translucent jelly right through, the same pinkish colour as the surface but paler, with no distinct layers, no gelatinous zone separate from a fleshy zone, no latex, and no colour change on cutting or bruising. The cut face stays wet and glassy.

Dried material behaves in a way that confirms the group. A fruitbody left in the sun shrivels to a small, hard, dark reddish-brown horny lump that looks like nothing at all, and if you soak that lump in water it swells back to something close to its original shape and colour within an hour. That revival behaviour is typical of jelly fungi and is a useful confirmation if you find shrivelled material in dry weather.

Taking a spore print

A print is achievable and worth doing. Because the fertile surface is the outer, convex face, you cannot simply lay the fruitbody down as you would a capped mushroom. The reliable method is to cut a section from a mature fruitbody, rest it fertile-side down across the mouth of a small container or suspend it over a slide or piece of dark card, cover the arrangement to keep the humidity high, and leave it overnight. Alternatively, set an entire fruitbody upright in a covered box with a dark card slipped beneath the outward-facing surface.

The deposit is white, and against black card it shows as a fine pale dust. Under a microscope the spores are elliptical to almond-shaped with a small apiculus, smooth and colourless, and the basidia are divided lengthwise into four cells, the tremelloid arrangement that places this species among the jelly fungi rather than among the cup fungi it superficially resembles.

Substrate and season

Apricot Jelly is a decayer of dead conifer wood. It works on buried roots, stumps and woody fragments in the soil, chiefly spruce, fir and pine, which is why fruitbodies appear to rise from bare earth. It shows a strong preference for compacted, disturbed, often gravelly or calcareous ground in upland and montane forest, and it is a good species to look for along forestry roads and eroded banks where old root systems have been cut through.

Season runs from mid-summer into autumn, peaking after warm rain. Fruitbodies are surprisingly persistent for a jelly fungus, lasting a week or more in humid conditions and reviving after a dry spell, so a patch can be revisited.

Separating it from look-alikes on morphology alone

Auricularia auricula-judae is the most frequently suggested comparison because it is ear-shaped and gelatinous, but the colour is wrong: it is tan, reddish-brown to date-brown, never salmon-pink. Its outer surface is finely velvety and greyish, its inner surface is folded and veined, it grows attached to standing or fallen broadleaved wood, especially elder, and it has no rooting stem-like base.

Tremella foliacea and Tremella fimbriata form clusters of brown to reddish-brown leafy lobes arising from a common base on wood, without the single split funnel form and without the rooting white stalk.

Tremella mesenterica and Dacrymyces species are bright yellow to orange brain-like or cushion-like masses on branches, quite different in both colour and form.

Calocera viscosa is orange-yellow, tough and gelatinous, but it is repeatedly branched into antler-like tines and grows visibly on conifer stumps, with a rooting base of its own; the branching form settles it.

Pseudohydnum gelatinosum is a translucent jelly fungus with a similar rubbery consistency, but it is grey, brown or whitish rather than pink and it has a spore-bearing surface covered in soft gelatinous spines.

Ascocoryne sarcoides forms clustered purple to reddish-purple gelatinous cushions and small stalkless discs on hardwood, never a large split funnel.

Helvella and Gyromitra species may be lobed and saddle-shaped but they are dry and brittle rather than gelatinous, and their tissue tears rather than flexing.

Any pink, translucent, rubbery, one-sided funnel with a smooth outer fertile face, a white rooting base into buried conifer wood, and a white spore print is this species.

Field checklist

Salmon to apricot-pink; translucent; firmly rubbery-gelatinous; funnel, tongue or ear shaped and split down one side; smooth fertile surface on the outer face; no gills, pores or spines; whitish rooting stalk-like base attached to buried conifer wood; white spore print; disturbed montane conifer ground; summer to autumn.