Blushing Bracket Identification Guide

First Impression and Setting

Damp ground, a stand of willow along a ditch or a birch on a boggy edge, and a dead standing stem or fallen branch carrying a row of hard, semicircular brackets. That is the picture ninety per cent of the time. The brackets sit on the wood like small shelves, often several stacked one above another along a branch, sometimes fused end to end into a wavy ridge.

At a distance the colour reads as banded brown, but up close the interest is in the range: cream and buff at the growing margin, then bands of tan, rusty brown, purple-brown and grey-brown behind it, with the oldest zones near the attachment often nearly blackish. The cap has a slightly polished, hard look, quite unlike the fuzzy velvet of many similar brackets.

This is an annual bracket, so the fruiting bodies you find in autumn were produced that year, but they are tough enough to persist through winter and into the following season in a faded, weathered state. Learning both the fresh and the weathered appearance saves a lot of confusion.

Reading the Upper Surface

A bracket is typically four to fifteen centimetres wide, two to eight deep and up to about two centimetres thick at the attachment, tapering to a sharp margin. The shape is semicircular, fan-shaped or kidney-shaped, broadly attached along one side with no stalk at all.

Run a finger from the margin inward. The surface is essentially smooth to finely felted when very young, quickly becoming bald, and it is distinctly wrinkled and roughened in a radial pattern with low ridges and bumps, giving it an uneven, almost knobbly feel that separates it from the smooth-and-velvety brackets. Concentric zones are present but they are as much textural as chromatic, appearing as slight steps or furrows.

The margin on an actively growing bracket is thin, pale cream to whitish, and often faintly wavy. This is the part that responds to bruising most obviously.

The Spore-Bearing Surface

Turn a branch over, or crouch to look up at the underside, because this is where the identification is confirmed. The hymenophore is variable in a way that is itself diagnostic. Near the margin the openings are often round to angular pores, roughly one per millimetre. Move toward the attachment and they elongate, become slot-like, then merge into an irregular maze, and in some collections the innermost part resolves into thick, blunt, gill-like plates that fork and anastomose.

That gradient, round pores at the edge running back into elongated slots and mazes, is the shape most typical of the species. Colour is whitish to pale grey or buff-grey when fresh, dulling to ochre-brown and then grey-brown with age and weathering.

Now do the test the common name is built on. Press a thumbnail firmly into the fresh pore surface of a young bracket. Within a minute or two the pressed area flushes pink to reddish or dull vinaceous, and on a really fresh specimen you can write on the underside with a blunt point. This blushing fades as the fruiting body ages, so a weathered winter bracket may not react at all, and the absence of a blush on old material is not evidence against the species.

Flesh, Base and Structure

There is no stipe. The bracket is broadly and directly attached to the wood, and it often begins as a lumpy cushion that expands outward into a shelf.

Cut a bracket in half through the attachment with a strong knife. The flesh is tough, leathery to corky, and only three to eight millimetres thick, whitish to pale tan or pale cinnamon. It is homogeneous, with no black line separating the flesh from the cap surface, and the tube layer beneath it is concolorous or slightly darker and typically a few millimetres deep. On drying, the whole bracket becomes hard, light and rigid.

Taking a Spore Print

Bracket fungi are less often printed than gilled mushrooms, but it is worth doing here because the print colour eliminates a whole group of brown-spored polypores. Cut a section carrying an intact pore surface, lay it pore-side-down on black paper or a dark glass plate, cover it with a bowl and leave it overnight at room temperature in a humid setting.

The deposit is white. Under a lens the spores are narrow, cylindrical to slightly sausage-shaped and smooth, quite unlike the broadly elliptical spores of many brackets. A brown or rusty deposit means you are somewhere else entirely.

Substrate, Season and Ecology

This is a saprotroph and weak parasite of broadleaf wood, with a marked preference for willow, and it is also frequent on birch, alder, hazel, hawthorn and other hardwoods. It fruits on standing dead stems, attached dead branches and fallen wood, especially in damp habitats such as carr woodland, ditch sides, riverbanks and wet scrub.

New brackets appear mainly from late summer through autumn, and they persist through winter, so you can find the species in almost any month. It causes a white rot of the sapwood, and heavily colonised willow stems often carry brackets along their whole length.

Separating It From Look-alikes on Morphology

Turkey tail, Trametes versicolor. Thin, flexible, strongly and brightly zoned, with a distinctly velvety or silky upper surface and much smaller, uniformly round pores, two to five per millimetre, that never elongate into slots or mazes. It does not blush pink when bruised, and its brackets are typically far thinner in section and grow in dense tiers.

Trametes gibbosa. Thick, whitish to grey-green with algal growth, with a hump at the attachment, and pores that are conspicuously elongated radially into slots. It is bigger, paler and does not bruise pink, and it favours beech stumps rather than wet willow.

Lenzites betulina. Similar zoned upper surface but the underside consists of true, thin, radiating gills, unbroken and blade-like all the way from attachment to margin, without any poroid zone near the edge. No blushing.

Daedalea quercina. Thick, corky, pale wood-brown, with a deep, coarse maze of thick-walled pores several millimetres across, growing typically on oak. The bracket is much thicker in section, the maze is uniform rather than graded from round pores at the margin, and it does not blush.

Daedaleopsis tricolor. The closest relative. It is darker overall, reddish to purplish-brown, and its underside is dominated by radiating gill-like plates from an early stage rather than showing the round-pore to maze gradient. Intermediate collections occur and are often treated as forms of one species.

Ganoderma species. Have a hard, often lacquered or dull crust, thick perennial layered tube systems, and brown spore deposits that dust nearby surfaces.

Quick Field Checklist

Sessile semicircular bracket on dead willow or birch in damp habitat; radially wrinkled zoned upper surface, cream margin to purple-brown centre; underside grading from round pores at the edge to elongated slots and mazes; fresh pore surface bruising pink; thin tough whitish flesh; white spore print; autumn onward, persisting through winter.