Crown-tipped Coral Identification Guide

The First Impression

It is high summer or early autumn, the woodland floor is damp, and on a barkless hardwood log you notice a pale, branched, almost plastic-looking growth like a miniature candelabra or a scrap of white sea coral. The first thing to register is not the shape but the substrate. It is growing out of wood, and it is doing so in a season when most other coral fungi have not started.

That single observation, a coral fungus on a log rather than on soil, narrows the possibilities dramatically before you touch anything.

Overall Architecture

Look at the whole cluster before you look at the details. A typical fruitbody is 5 to 13 cm tall and 3 to 10 cm across, arising from one or a few tough basal stems that anchor into the wood. From that base the branches ascend and divide repeatedly, and the divisions tend to occur at the same level, so the structure has a tiered, storeyed look with successive whorls of branches stacked one above the next. Several fruitbodies usually line up along a crack or a decorticated strip of the log.

The Crown Tips

Now put a hand lens on the tip of any branch, including the inner ones. Each apex is not pointed and not blunt: it is a shallow crater or cup, and the rim of that cup carries three to six short, erect, evenly spaced points. The effect under magnification is of a tiny crown or coronet. Every growing tip is built this way, and the next order of branches sprouts from those crown points, which is exactly how the tiered architecture is generated.

No other coral in temperate woodland does this. If you can see crowns on the tips, you can stop worrying about the rest of the coral genera and simply confirm the supporting characters.

Colour, Texture and Flesh

Young fruitbodies are white to cream. With age they warm through pinkish-buff to ochre and tan, browning from the base upwards and from any damaged points outwards; drying specimens go dull yellowish-brown. Old material is often badly discoloured, so judge colour from a fresh cluster.

The fertile surface is not confined to a gill or pore layer. It simply coats the branches, so the whole outer skin is spore-producing. Feel the texture: the flesh is tough, pliant and slightly rubbery, bending well before it breaks, and a branch snapped across shows a fibrous, cartilaginous interior rather than a chalky or watery one. Handling causes at most a slow brownish discolouration.

Base and Substrate

Trace the base carefully. It should end on wood: a decorticated log, a large fallen branch, or occasionally a stump. Where the fruitbody appears to arise from soil, scrape away the litter, because buried wood and part-covered logs are common and the identification depends on getting this right. Whitish mycelial felt often binds wood fibres and debris around the point of attachment.

Taking a Spore Print

Corals print poorly if you simply lay them on paper, because the fertile surface faces every direction. The reliable method is to lay a detached branch cluster on its side on dark card, cover it with a box containing a damp tissue, and leave it four to eight hours. A faint white dust settles in the shadow of the branches. Fresh material at peak drop can also be seen shedding a whitish bloom.

Under the microscope the spores are very small, roughly 4 to 5 by 2 to 3 micrometres, ellipsoid, minutely roughened, and they stain blue in iodine.

Substrate, Season and Ecology

The hosts are deciduous: willow, poplar and aspen are classic, with maple, birch, beech and elm also frequent. Conifer records are unusual. The fungus is a white-rot saprotroph, digesting lignin in the sapwood of well-decayed logs, which is why it is so often found on wood that has already lost its bark and gone soft enough to dent with a thumbnail.

Fruiting begins earlier than in most coral fungi, from early summer through autumn, and follows warm rain closely. Colonies frequently reappear on the same log for several consecutive years, and a productive log may carry a dozen or more fruitbodies scattered along its length.

Separating the Look-alikes on Morphology

Ramaria stricta is the real test, because it also grows on wood and has an upright, repeatedly branched habit. Separate it on three points: its branch tips end in two or three sharp, converging points with no cup or crown; its colour is a warmer ochre-yellow to tan with yellow tips rather than white to cream; and the branches bruise wine-brown to dull brown where handled, often within a minute. Its base is usually attached to buried wood by conspicuous white cords, and it has a distinctly sweetish, aromatic smell.

The large fleshy terrestrial corals, such as Ramaria botrytis and Ramaria formosa, come out of the soil from a thick, massive, cauliflower-like base and have blunt or pointed tips; the substrate alone settles them.

Crested Coral, Clavulina coristata, is whitish but grows from soil, its tips are finely and irregularly crested or antler-like rather than crowned, and its flesh is more brittle.

Tremellodendron and similar jelly corals are terrestrial, with flattened, tough-gelatinous branches that feel rubbery-slippery rather than dry.

Young Hericium species on wood are white too, but they hang as a cushion of downward-pointing spines rather than an upright branched framework, and the spines are unbranched.

Working Checklist

• Growing directly from decorticated hardwood, never from bare soil
• Upright, repeatedly and tieredly branched, 5 to 13 cm tall
• Every branch apex a shallow cup rimmed with three to six small points, a crown under a lens
• White to cream, ageing pinkish-tan and browning from the base
• Tough, pliant, slightly rubbery flesh; fertile surface covering the branches
• White spore print; early summer into autumn