Parrot Waxcap

The Parrot Waxcap is the great colour-changer of autumn grassland. Fresh young fruit bodies are a startling bottle- or olive-green all over; as they expand, the pigment washes out unevenly, so a single troop may contain green, lemon, apricot, salmon-pink and brownish caps at once — the parrot-plumage effect that gives it its name. Almost always a green tinge survives at the very apex of the stem, which is the character to look for when the cap has faded.

The species is now placed in Gliophorus, a genus split from Hygrocybe for waxcaps that are glutinous over both cap and stem. Many field guides still list it as Hygrocybe psittacina, and a distinctly larger, chrome-yellow relative, Gliophorus reginae, has been separated from it more recently.

Everything about the mushroom is slimy: cap, gill edges and stem are coated in a thick clear gluten that picks up grass fragments and makes the fruit body hard to hold. That glutinous coat, combined with the shifting greens and yellows, makes it one of the easiest waxcaps to name in the field.

Cap

Small, 1.5–4 cm across, conical to bell-shaped at first and later flattening with a broad umbo, and often translucently striate at the margin when wet. It is covered in a thick, clear, slippery gluten. The initial deep green fades irregularly from the margin inwards to yellow, orange, apricot, salmon or dull brownish tones, frequently retaining green streaks in the centre.

Gills

Broad, thick, waxy and well spaced, adnate to slightly emarginate and sometimes with a short decurrent tooth. They are greenish at first, especially near the cap margin, becoming yellow to orange or pale salmon, with edges that are often glutinous in wet conditions.

Stipe

3–8 cm tall, slender, 3–8 mm thick, cylindrical and hollow, and coated in the same clear slime as the cap. It is yellow to orange over most of its length but characteristically green at the apex, and that green apical zone often persists long after the cap has lost its colour. No ring, no volva.

Flesh and spore print

The flesh is thin, fragile, yellowish to greenish and does not change colour when cut. The spore print is white; spores are smooth and ellipsoid. The slime layer dries to a shiny varnish in dry weather but reconstitutes after rain.

Found in short, closed grassland of the traditional waxcap type: churchyards, old lawns, unimproved pasture, upland grassland, coastal turf and dune slacks. It is somewhat more tolerant than the rarest waxcaps and turns up on well-established garden lawns and mown amenity grass, usually in scattered troops among moss.

It fruits from late summer through autumn, with the main flush from September to November, and it is widespread and fairly common across temperate Europe, with records from North America, Asia and the southern hemisphere, some of which may represent related Gliophorus species. It has declined regionally wherever old grassland has been ploughed or fertilised.

Like other grassland waxcaps, Gliophorus psittacinus lives as a perennial mycelium in the upper soil of undisturbed turf. It is not a wood decayer and does not colonise litter piles or mulch; isotope evidence points to a biotrophic association with grassland plants or mosses rather than straightforward saprotrophy, and the fungus has resisted cultivation on ordinary media.

The thick gluten covering the fruit body probably serves to keep the small, thin-fleshed mushroom hydrated and to protect the developing spores in exposed grassland conditions. Fruiting follows autumn rains, and colonies reappear in the same patches of moss-rich turf year after year.

Gliophorus laetus is the nearest relative in the field: it is similarly glutinous but pinkish-buff to flesh-coloured rather than green, with strongly decurrent gills that have a distinctly gelatinous, often lilac-tinged edge. Gliophorus reginae is larger, more robust and chrome-yellow to golden with only a brief green phase. Gliophorus irrigatus is grey-brown and slimy with a dull, colourless appearance.

Faded orange Parrot Waxcaps can be mistaken for Hygrocybe chlorophana, but that species has a viscid cap over a stem that is at most slightly greasy, is uniformly yellow with no green anywhere, and is generally larger. The safest check is the stem apex: a green flush at the top of a wholly slimy stem confirms the Parrot Waxcap.