Date Waxcap
Hygrocybe spadicea
Also called date-coloured waxcap, date wax cap
A rare and unmistakable waxcap combining a dark date-brown conical cap with vivid lemon-yellow gills and stipe.
Overview
The Date Waxcap is one of the few genuinely brown members of a genus otherwise famous for scarlet, orange and yellow. Its dark, almost sepia cap contrasts sharply with bright yellow gills and a yellow stipe, a combination that no other European waxcap shows, making it one of the easiest waxcaps to name once found.
It is also one of the scarcest. In much of its range it is known from a small number of long-established grasslands and is listed as being of conservation concern in several national assessments. Finding it is usually taken as a sign of an exceptional grassland site.
The species sits within Hygrocybe proper, sharing the waxy gills, white spore print and grassland habit of its brighter relatives, but its pigmentation is dominated by brown rather than carotenoid tones.
How to identify it
Cap
The cap is 2-6 cm across, conical to bluntly conical, expanding somewhat but keeping a pointed or broadly umbonate centre with a margin that often splits radially. The colour is dark date-brown to sepia or almost blackish-brown at the disc, paling towards the margin, with a silky-fibrillose to finely streaked surface that is moist but not slimy.
Gills
The gills provide the strongest contrast: free to narrowly adnexed, thick, waxy, moderately spaced, and a clear lemon to golden yellow, sometimes with a faintly brownish edge in old specimens. Cross-veins may be present between them.
Stipe
The stipe is 3-8 cm tall, cylindrical, often flattened or grooved, dry, fibrillose-striate, and pale to bright yellow, sometimes whitish at the very base. There is no ring and no volva.
Flesh and spore print
The flesh is pale yellow, thin, and does not change colour when cut or bruised; it never blackens. The odour is not distinctive. The spore print is white.
Where and when it grows
Date Waxcap occurs in short, unimproved grassland, showing a preference for calcareous or base-rich soils: chalk and limestone downland, coastal grassland over shell sand, old dune slacks and occasionally ancient churchyards and lawns. It is very rarely reported from acidic upland pasture where other waxcaps abound.
Fruiting runs from late summer into autumn. The species is thinly scattered across Europe from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, with additional records from parts of North America. Populations are typically small, with only a handful of fruitbodies appearing at a site in a good year, and many historic sites have been lost to agricultural improvement.
Ecological role
As with other waxcaps, the fungus lives in the moss and root layer of old turf, forming a long-lived mycelium that appears to draw carbon through a biotrophic association rather than by decomposing dead grass litter. It cannot recolonise ploughed or fertilised ground within useful timescales.
Because it is restricted to base-rich, undisturbed swards, its ecological requirements are narrower than those of common waxcaps, and it functions as a high-scoring indicator species in grassland fungus surveys. Fruiting is sporadic, with several barren years possible between flushes even at established sites.
Similar species
No other European waxcap combines a dark brown conical cap with yellow gills, so a confident field identification is usually possible. Old, weathered Blackening Waxcaps (Hygrocybe conica) can look brownish, but their gills grey and blacken and the whole fruitbody discolours on handling, whereas H. spadicea stays yellow-gilled.
Dark forms of the Persistent Waxcap (Hygrocybe acutoconica) may develop a brownish disc but retain yellow-orange cap colours overall. Brown Entoloma species such as the Silky Pinkgill (Entoloma sericeum) share dull brown caps and grassland habitat but have thin, non-waxy gills that turn pink with maturity and a pink spore print, and they never show lemon-yellow gills.