Deadly Galerina Identification Guide

The Log You Are Standing Over

Nearly every Deadly Galerina encounter starts the same way: a mossy, well-rotted conifer log or stump in damp woodland, with a scattering or a loose cluster of small tawny-brown mushrooms pushing straight out of the softened wood. Some are on the upper surface, some on the shaded flank, and a few come out of the ground beside the log where buried wood lies just under the moss.

The first impression is of modest size and a slightly slimy honey-brown sheen, with pale drying patches on the older caps. Then you notice the small pale ring on the stem, and the stem below the ring being much darker than the part above. That set of impressions, on rotten wood, late in the year, is the shape of the identification.

Reading the Cap

Caps run 1.5 to 4 cm across, occasionally to 6. Young ones are conical to convex with an incurved margin, expanding to broadly convex or flat and usually keeping a slight umbo. The surface is smooth, without scales or fibrils, and faintly greasy to sub-viscid when wet, drying to a matt finish.

The species is strongly hygrophanous, and this produces the classic two-tone look. A rain-soaked cap is a rich tawny, ochre-brown or dark date-brown with a finely translucent-striate margin through which you can see the gill lines. As it dries, a pale buff or ochre patch spreads out from the centre, leaving a darker moist rim, so that a single group offers caps ranging from dark and lined to pale and matt. Do not treat those extremes as separate species.

The Gills

The gills are moderately crowded, fairly narrow, and attached to the stem as adnate, often with a short decurrent tooth. Young gills are pale yellow-brown, tan or clay; as the spores ripen they deepen to a warm rusty brown, and old caps look distinctly foxy underneath. Under a lens the gill edges are paler and finely uneven, a reflection of the flask-shaped cystidia lining them. That rusty maturity is the first strong hint at the genus.

The Ring and the Two-Toned Stipe

The stipe is 2 to 6 cm long and 2 to 6 mm thick, equal or slightly enlarged below, and hollow when old. The veil leaves a distinct but thin membranous ring on the upper stem, often small, sometimes collapsing to a fine fibrillose zone in age, and typically dusted rusty by fallen spores.

Above the ring the stem is pale, whitish or pale tan, and finely mealy. Below it the stem darkens progressively downwards to a mid or dark brown and is covered with fine silky whitish fibrils, which in dry weather look like a pale sheen over dark ground. The very base is usually knitted into the wood by white mycelial down. Note that the lower stipe is fibrillose and silky, never coarsely shaggy or scaly.

Flesh, Odour and Colour Change

Cut a fruitbody lengthwise. The cap flesh is thin and pale brownish, the stipe flesh darker and fibrous. Nothing changes dramatically on exposure, though the split surface may darken slightly as it dries. Crushed fresh flesh has a mealy, farinaceous smell in most collections, sometimes weak and easily missed in wet weather.

Taking a Spore Print

Take a mature cap, cut the stem flush, and set it gills down on white paper with a cup over it for four to eight hours. The deposit is a clear rusty brown, distinctly warmer and more orange than the dull snuff-brown of an Agrocybe and utterly different from the purple-brown of Hypholoma or the white of Armillaria.

Under the microscope the spores are the clincher for the genus. They are roughly 8 to 11 by 5 to 6.5 micrometres, ellipsoid to almond-shaped, and their surface is roughened, wrinkled or warty rather than smooth, with a smooth patch just above the attachment point called a plage. There is no germ pore. Combined with the swollen, flask-shaped cystidia on the gill edge, that spore ornament and plage confirm Galerina.

Substrate and Season

Galerina marginata is a wood-decay fungus, producing a brown rot on well-rotted timber. It shows a marked preference for conifer wood, especially spruce, pine and fir logs and stumps in an advanced state of decay, but it also occurs on hardwood, on sawn stumps, on woodchip mulch and on wood buried under moss or soil. Because buried wood is easy to miss, always probe the substrate: apparently terrestrial fruitbodies almost always trace back to a woody fragment.

Fruiting is mainly from late summer through late autumn, and this species is notably cold-tolerant, often continuing well after frost has cleared away most other gilled fungi. Fruitbodies occur singly, in scattered troops, and in small clusters of a few stems joined at the base, but not usually in the huge dense tufts formed by some wood-rotting genera.

Separating the Close Look-alikes on Morphology Alone

Kuehneromyces mutabilis is the classic confusion, sharing size, colour, ring and rusty print. Separate it by looking below the ring: the sheathed woodtuft has a stem covered with small recurved brown scales, giving a rough, shaggy texture, while Galerina marginata is smooth and silky-fibrillose there. Kuehneromyces also grows in dense tufts on hardwood stumps, and its drying caps often show a sharply defined darker water-soaked outer band.

Pholiota species are generally larger, with scaly or strongly viscid caps and coarser veils.

Hypholoma species have young gills tinged yellow, olive or green, mature gills clouded purple-brown, and a purple-brown to blackish print.

Gymnopilus species are bigger and brighter, foxy orange to rusty yellow, with fibrillose caps and often a cortina-like veil rather than a neat membranous ring.

Flammulina velutipes carries a velvety, blackish-brown lower stem, has no ring at all, and drops a white print.

Armillaria species are far larger, with a white print and a substantial cottony ring.

Tubaria furfuracea grows on woodchips and litter with a scurfy cap margin, no true ring, and a duller ochre print.

Ringless Galerina species in moss lack the stem ring and grow among Sphagnum and other mosses rather than on rotting logs.

Field Checklist

Small tawny mushrooms on well-rotted conifer wood; smooth hygrophanous cap drying pale from the centre with a briefly striate margin; adnate gills ripening rusty; a thin membranous ring on a stem that is pale above and darker with silky fibrils below, never scaly; mealy smell; rusty spore print; ornamented spores with a plage. That set defines the Deadly Galerina.