Funeral Bell Identification Guide

The Scene You Find It In

Funeral Bell belongs to a category that field mycologists learn to slow down for: small brown mushrooms on rotten wood. The setting is a conifer stump losing its bark, a mossy fallen trunk sinking into the forest floor, a heap of ageing wood chips beside a path, or a patch of ground where a buried root is quietly decaying. Fruit bodies come up scattered, in small groups, or in loose clusters of a few stems sharing an origin, and they are often bedded into moss so that only the caps show.

Because the substrate is so often hidden, the first practical step is not to look at the mushroom but to dig around its base. Scrape back the moss and litter with a finger. If the stems trace back to wood, whether an obvious log or a buried fragment, you are in the right family of possibilities. Galerina marginata is a wood decomposer and will not be found rooted in pure soil, however soil-like the surface looks.

Reading the Cap

Caps run one and a half to four centimetres across, occasionally to six. They start convex or bluntly conical and expand to broadly bell-shaped or flat with a low umbo, with a margin that is often slightly uneven or wavy in age. The surface is smooth, bald and faintly greasy when wet, drying to a matt finish. Scales, fibrils and slime are absent.

The defining cap character is hygrophany. A rain-soaked cap is a rich tawny honey-brown to cinnamon, and its outer margin is translucent-striate, meaning you can see the shadow of the gills through the flesh as fine radial lines. As it dries, the colour retreats: the centre pales first to ochre-buff or dull tan, then the pale zone spreads outward, leaving a two-toned cap with a darker rim. Photograph or note both states, because a description based only on a dried cap will send you to the wrong species.

The Gills

Turn the cap over. The gills are close, moderately broad, and attached to the stem either squarely or with a slight decurrent tooth that runs a short distance down. Early on they are pale ochre-yellow or dull buff. As the spores mature they shift to a warm rust-brown or cinnamon, and the edges stay marginally paler and finely uneven. Check several fruit bodies of different ages: seeing the whole colour progression from pale buff to rust is much more informative than a single mature cap.

The Ring and the Stipe Below It

The stem is where this species declares itself. It is two to six centimetres tall and three to eight millimetres thick, cylindrical, sometimes slightly enlarged at the base, and hollow in age. Young fruit bodies have a distinct membranous ring set high on the stem. It is thin, and after a few days of weather it may flatten to a mere fibrillose band or vanish entirely, so a ringless mature stem does not eliminate the species if a young neighbour shows one.

Divide the stem visually at the ring. Above it, the surface is pale, dull ochre, and finely mealy or powdery under a hand lens. Below it, the ground colour is brown, darkening progressively toward the base until it is almost blackish-brown in old fruit bodies, and it is overlaid with fine whitish silky fibrils that give a faint streaked or frosted look. Crucially, that covering is silky and appressed, never made of coarse recurved scales. The extreme base is usually clothed in white downy mycelium that grips the wood.

Flesh, Odour and Colour Change

Split a fruit body from cap to stem base. The flesh is thin, watery and pale brownish, matching the exterior in the stem and paler in the cap. It does not bruise blue, red or black, and cut surfaces stay much as they were, darkening only as they dry out. Odour, when present, is faintly farinaceous or floury, and many collections smell of very little at all. A strong radish, geranium or aniseed smell points away from this species.

Taking and Reading a Spore Print

Set a mature cap gill-down on white paper, cover it with a cup, and leave it several hours. The print is rusty brown, sometimes leaning to ochre-brown, and the colour matters because it is the fastest way to divide the small brown wood mushrooms into groups.

Under a microscope the spores are ellipsoid to almond-shaped and comparatively large, roughly eight to eleven by five to six and a half microns. They are distinctly roughened, with a wrinkled or warty outer layer that often loosens, and they carry a smooth suprahilar patch, the plage, which stands out as a flat clear area near the attachment point. In Melzer's reagent they turn reddish-brown, that is, they are dextrinoid. The gill edges bear abundant flask-shaped cheilocystidia with a narrow neck and a swollen belly. Roughened, plage-bearing, dextrinoid spores are a far stronger determination than any external character.

Substrate, Season and Distribution

The substrate is decaying wood, most often conifer, with spruce, pine and fir logs and stumps the classic sources, although hardwood and mixed chip mulch are used as well. Well-rotted, damp, bark-shedding wood is preferred, and buried wood produces fruit bodies that appear to be growing from soil. The season is unusually broad: this species fruits in spring, through summer in wet spells, and most abundantly in autumn, continuing later into cold weather than many wood-rotting fungi.

Separating It From Its Closest Look-Alikes

Sheathed Woodtuft, Kuehneromyces mutabilis, is the great morphological twin. It forms denser tufts, usually on hardwood stumps, and its cap is more sharply two-toned with a persistent darker moist marginal band. The decisive character is the stem below the ring, which in Kuehneromyces is covered in conspicuous dark brown recurved scales that you can feel with a fingernail, whereas Galerina marginata has flat silky fibrils. Microscopically, Kuehneromyces has smooth spores with a clear germ pore rather than rough spores with a plage.

Honey fungus, Armillaria species, shares a ringed stem on wood but is larger, has a thicker persistent ring, a fibrous scaly cap and, decisively, a white spore print with white to cream gills. Hypholoma species, such as the sulphur tufts, grow in tight clusters, have yellow-green to olive gill tints and drop a purple-brown print. Pholiota species are larger, with slimy or coarsely scaly caps. Flammulina velutipes has a smooth orange cap, no ring at all, and a velvety dark brown stem, with a white print. Gymnopilus species are brighter orange-rusty, larger, and often lack a well-formed membranous ring. Conocybe and Pholiotina species with rings are fragile, grow on soil, lawns or dung rather than wood, and have smooth spores with a germ pore.

Field Checklist

Attached to wood, including buried wood; cap one and a half to four centimetres, smooth, honey to tawny brown, hygrophanous with a translucent-striate margin, drying two-toned; gills close, buff then rusty; ring present at least in youth; stem brown below the ring with appressed silky whitish fibrils and a darkening base; flesh unchanging; rusty brown print; roughened dextrinoid spores with a plage.