Common Puffball

Common Puffball (Lycoperdon perlatum) is the standard against which other small puffballs are compared. The fruit body is pear-shaped to top-shaped, with a rounded fertile head above and a narrowed, stalk-like sterile base below, giving it an inverted-pear silhouette.

The outer skin is white to pale grey and carries two sizes of ornament: large detachable conical spines or "gems" surrounded by a background of much smaller warts. As the fungus matures the spines drop away and leave circular scars, producing a distinctive net-like or pockmarked pattern over the ochre-brown surface.

In the genus Lycoperdon, spores escape through a single apical pore that opens at the top of the mature head, so raindrops or a touch send out a visible puff of powder — the behaviour that gives the family its common names.

Fruiting body

2–6 cm wide and 3–8 cm tall, pear-shaped to club-shaped or top-shaped, with a distinct narrowed base. Usually in scattered troops or small clusters.

Surface

White at first, ageing through cream and grey to ochre or yellowish brown. Ornamented with removable conical spines up to 2 mm long, each ringed by a rosette of small granular warts; where the spines drop, smooth circular scars remain, giving a mosaic-like pattern.

Interior and spore mass

The interior is uniformly white and firm when young, then turns yellowish, olive and finally powdery olive-brown to dark brown as the spores mature. The sterile base persists as a spongy, chambered column beneath the spore mass and remains distinctly separate in colour. A single round pore opens at the apex for spore release.

Spore print

Not produced in the usual sense; the spore mass is olive-brown to umber and is puffed out through the apical pore.

It grows on the ground in woodland of all kinds, on needle duff under conifers and leaf litter under broadleaves, and along shaded paths, banks and clearings. It also appears in parks, plantations and occasionally on very rotten wood or wood chip.

Fruiting runs from summer to late autumn, and old blackened fruit bodies often persist through winter. The species is widespread and common throughout the northern hemisphere and has been introduced widely elsewhere.

Lycoperdon perlatum is a saprophyte, decomposing leaf litter, needle duff and humus in the forest floor and returning nutrients to the soil. Its spores are dispersed by the bellows action of the fruit body: raindrops striking the tough, papery mature skin compress the interior and expel a cloud of spores through the apical pore, a mechanism shared across the genus.

Fruiting is gregarious, and troops often reappear in the same patch of litter over consecutive seasons.

Lycoperdon echinatum has much longer, dark brown spines that converge in groups of three or four and grows chiefly under beech on rich soil. Apioperdon pyriforme, the stump puffball, is smooth to finely granular rather than spiny, grows in dense clusters directly on stumps and buried wood, and has conspicuous white cords at the base. Scleroderma citrinum, the common earthball, has a thick, tough, coarsely warted yellow-brown rind, no stalk-like sterile base, and a firm dark purple-black interior from an early stage, and it tears open irregularly instead of forming a neat pore.

Young egg-stage Amanita species can resemble small white puffballs from outside, but a lengthwise section through them shows the outline of a developing cap, gills and stem, whereas a young puffball is uniform throughout.