Cortinarius gentilis

Cortinarius gentilis is a small Telamonia webcap of boreal and montane conifer forest. It is one of a group of slender, tawny to orange-brown species whose overall colour and slim proportions look much alike, and which historically were placed near the Dermocybe webcaps because of their bright pigments.

The fruitbody is modest — a conical, sharply umbonate cap rarely more than 4 cm across, on a long thin stem — but the colour is warm and clean: tawny, foxy or orange-brown, with the same tone running through cap, gills and stem. Yellowish veil remnants form scattered belts on the stem and are a useful confirming detail.

It fruits from moss carpets under spruce and pine on acid soils and is a characteristic member of the northern conifer mycota. As with all webcaps, the cobwebby cortina in youth and the rusty brown spore print place it firmly in Cortinarius rather than in the smaller brown genera it superficially resembles.

Cap

Small, about 1.5–4 cm across, conical to bell-shaped when young and later convex with a prominent pointed umbo. The surface is dry and finely silky-fibrillose, sometimes with faint pale veil fibrils near the margin, and coloured tawny, foxy-orange to yellow-brown, becoming paler and duller as it dries.

Gills

Distinctly thick and rather widely spaced, adnate to slightly decurrent by a tooth, ochre-yellow to tawny when young and darkening to a strong rusty brown with maturity. The wide spacing and warm yellow tone are useful characters. A thin yellowish cortina veils them in buttons.

Stipe

Slender and often long relative to the cap, 4–10 cm tall and only 3–7 mm thick, cylindrical or slightly tapering, coloured like the cap in tawny-yellow to orange-brown, and marked by one or several yellowish veil girdles or fibrillose bands. Yellow mycelial threads may bind the base into the moss.

Flesh & spore print

The flesh is thin and yellowish-brown to tawny throughout, with a mild or slightly radish-like smell and no marked colour change on cutting. The spore print is rusty brown; the spores are ellipsoid to almond-shaped and warted.

This species grows in coniferous forest, principally with Norway spruce and pine, on acid, humus-rich soils. It is typical of mossy forest floors, Sphagnum-rich hollows, blueberry and heather understorey, and damp conifer plantations, and often fruits directly out of deep moss carpets.

Fruiting runs from late summer into autumn. The distribution is boreal and montane: widespread across northern Europe and in the mountain conifer belt further south, and present in comparable northern conifer forest across North America.

Cortinarius gentilis is ectomycorrhizal with conifers. Its mycelium wraps the short roots of spruce and pine in a fungal mantle and threads between the outer cells, transferring nitrogen and phosphorus captured from acid, organic-rich soil to the tree, and receiving carbohydrate in return. On the podzolic soils of northern forests, where nutrients are locked in slowly decaying litter, this pathway supplies a substantial share of the trees' nutrient budget.

The warm tawny and yellow pigments in the fruitbody and mycelial threads belong to the anthraquinone group that characterises many webcaps and has long made members of this genus interesting to dyers. The perennial mycelium persists in the moss and humus layers and forms part of the underground network linking conifers across the stand.

Cortinarius cinnamomeus is similar in size and colour but has more crowded, brighter yellow to saffron gills and a more olive-brown cap. Cortinarius croceus is duller and more olive with distinctly yellow gills, while Cortinarius rubellus is larger and stouter with a more strongly red-brown, finely scaly cap and a thicker stem, and Cortinarius uliginosus is a brighter orange-red species of wet willow ground.

Outside the genus, Galerina species in the same moss are smaller with smooth, more strongly hygrophanous caps and often a membranous ring rather than a cobwebby cortina, and their spore prints are more ochre-brown. Judge by gill spacing and colour, the presence of yellowish stem girdles, cap texture and the rusty brown spore print.