Goatcheese Webcap

The Goatcheese Webcap is a pale violet-blue mushroom of northern spruce forest, closely related to the Gassy Webcap and sharing its habit of announcing itself by smell. The odour is strong, persistent and hard to mistake once known, and it is the reason for both the English name and the epithet camphoratus.

Structurally it belongs among the dry-capped, silky, veil-sheathed webcaps, with a firm bulbous-based stipe and a cap that dries from lilac to dull ochre. Its practical separation from its lookalikes rests on two internal features: the young gills are bluish-lilac rather than ochre, and the flesh is whitish with lilac tints rather than saffron-marbled.

It is a characteristic fungus of old mossy spruce woodland in the boreal and montane zones, often fruiting in troops among feather mosses where the canopy is dense and the ground permanently damp.

Cap

4-10 cm across, convex at first with an inrolled margin, expanding to broadly convex or flat. The surface is dry and silky to finely fibrillose, pale lilac to greyish blue-violet when fresh and fading to buff, clay or dull ochre from the centre outward as it dries.

Gills

Adnate to emarginate, moderately crowded, and bluish-lilac to pale violet when young, an important contrast with the ochre gills of the Gassy Webcap. They pass through clay-brown to rusty cinnamon as spores ripen, and the edges stay paler.

Stipe

5-12 cm long, firm and stout, thickening downward to a swollen or distinctly bulbous base. It is pale lilac, sheathed in silky whitish-violet veil fibres that often form a woolly ring-like zone, and the cobwebby cortina above catches rusty spores.

Flesh & spore print

Flesh is fairly thick, whitish with pale lilac tints in cap and stipe apex, and brownish only in the extreme base; it does not turn saffron or become marbled when cut. The smell is very strong and penetrating, noticeable at a distance. The spore print is rusty brown, spores almond-shaped and warted.

This webcap grows in coniferous woodland, above all with Norway spruce, and less often with pine, on acid, humus-rich or peaty soils. It is a species of deep moss carpets, fruiting in scattered troops or small clusters among feather mosses and Sphagnum in shaded, permanently damp forest, and it is a good indicator of long-established stands.

The season is late summer to autumn. It is common across Scandinavia and the boreal forest belt, in montane spruce forests of central Europe, and in northern Britain, particularly in Scotland. Comparable populations occur through the northern conifer forests of North America.

Cortinarius camphoratus is an ectomycorrhizal partner of spruce and pine. Its hyphae wrap the tree's fine roots in a mantle and penetrate between the outer cortical cells to form a Hartig net, the exchange surface across which soil-derived nitrogen, phosphorus and water move into the root while photosynthetic sugars move outward into the fungus.

In boreal forest soils, where nutrients are locked in slowly decomposing needle litter and raw humus, webcaps of this kind are among the dominant root symbionts and play a major part in nutrient cycling. The strongly volatile compounds that give the fruitbody its smell diffuse widely through the moss layer and may serve to attract spore-dispersing insects or to deter grazing invertebrates.

Cortinarius traganus is the principal confusion: it too is lilac with a bulbous stipe and a strong smell, but its gills are ochre to saffron from the start and its stipe flesh is saffron-brown and marbled rather than whitish-lilac. Cortinarius alboviolaceus has a pearly silvery cap, grows with broadleaved trees and has no strong smell.

Cortinarius malachius is another lilac conifer species but has a more distinctly scaly cap surface and a less bulbous stipe. Cortinarius violaceus is unmistakably darker, a deep blackish violet throughout with a dry woolly-scaly cap.