Parrot Waxcap Identification Guide

The Setting and the First Impression

This is a fungus of old, unimproved grassland, and the habitat is half the identification. Think of a mossy churchyard, a cropped hillside pasture that has never been ploughed or fertilised, a lawn that has been mown but never fed, a dune slack, a coastal cliff top or a woodland clearing kept short by rabbits. The turf will usually be short, mossy and rather poor. Waxcaps as a group announce themselves by colour, and this one is the odd member of the family: your first impression is a small, glossy, startlingly green cap sitting low in the moss, looking wet even in dry weather. The whole fruitbody is small, typically two to four centimetres across the cap and four to seven centimetres tall, and it commonly appears in loose scattered groups alongside other waxcaps in reds, yellows and oranges. When you go to pick it, the fruitbody feels like it is coated in clear jelly and tends to slip through the fingers, which is itself a strong hint.

Reading the Cap

Start with the shape and the coating. Young caps are conical to bell-shaped, later expanding to broadly convex or flattened, often with a low central umbo and a margin that becomes translucently striate as the cap thins. The surface is covered in a thick, colourless, sticky gluten. In dry weather that layer shrinks to a varnish-like gloss, and in wet weather it becomes a slippery jelly that traps grass fragments and grit. Nothing else in a good waxcap grassland is quite this slimy.

The colour is where beginners come unstuck, because it is not stable. A fresh young fruitbody is a vivid, almost artificial green, ranging from grass green to a deep bluish or bottle green over the centre. From that point it fades, and it fades unevenly. Cap colour moves through yellow-green to lemon, then to butter yellow, then to orange, apricot and finally to pinkish or brownish tones on old fruitbodies. This means you can find a single troop containing a green button, a half-yellow adolescent and a fully orange senior, all the same species. Do not identify from cap colour alone; identify from the sequence and from where the green persists longest.

The Gills

Turn it over and look at the gills with the light behind them. They are thick, broad, soft and noticeably widely spaced, with an appearance often described as waxy: pinch one between finger and thumb and it smears rather than shatters. Attachment is adnate to slightly emarginate, very often with a short decurrent tooth running down onto the stipe apex. Colour follows the cap but lags behind, so the gills are usually green when the cap is green, then yellow to yellowish orange, frequently retaining a greenish tinge at the point of attachment after the cap has faded. Interveining between the gills is common in mature fruitbodies.

Stipe, Base and Flesh

The stipe is cylindrical, slender, smooth, hollow and, crucially, just as glutinous as the cap. It is coloured like the cap but almost always keeps green at the very apex for longer than the cap does, so a fruitbody with an orange cap will often still have a clean green collar in the first few millimetres below the gills. That persistent apical green is the most reliable single field character. The lower stipe fades to yellow, orange or whitish, and the base is simple, tapered or slightly rooting into the moss, with no bulb, sac or ring. The flesh is thin, fragile, watery and coloured like the surface. There is no colour change on cutting or bruising beyond a slight darkening as the tissue becomes waterlogged, and the odour is faint or absent.

Taking a Spore Print

The cap is small, thin and slimy, so give it help. Sever the stipe cleanly, blot the gluten off the top of the cap with tissue so it does not stick to the cover, and set the cap gills-down on dark card, since the print is white. Cover it and leave it for four to eight hours in a cool place. The deposit is white to very faintly cream. A pink, brown or black print takes you out of the waxcaps entirely, and it is worth checking because a faded orange fruitbody can superficially resemble several unrelated small grassland fungi.

Substrate and Season

Waxcaps fruit in nutrient-poor, undisturbed, closely grazed or mown grassland with a strong moss component, and the presence of a waxcap assemblage is a well-known signal of long grassland continuity. Fruiting is mainly autumnal, from late summer through to the first hard frosts, and is triggered by soaked ground after rain. Fruitbodies are short lived and easily flattened by grazing stock, so surveys are best done soon after wet weather. The species also turns up in mossy lawns, on old golf course roughs and in damp dune grassland.

Separating the Look-alikes on Morphology

Within the slimy waxcaps, the closest confusion is with a related species whose fruitbodies are similarly glutinous but coloured pinkish, salmon or lilac-grey, with a distinctly gelatinised gill edge that can be peeled away as a separate thread, and which never shows true green anywhere. Another close relative shares the sliminess and the general build but runs orange-brown to olivaceous from the start, without a green phase, and is best separated by checking a series of young fruitbodies for any green at all.

The plain yellow waxcaps cause trouble once a fruitbody has faded. One common yellow species has a moist but not truly glutinous cap and a dry, non-slimy stipe; running the stipe between the fingers is usually enough, because in this species the stipe slime is as heavy as the cap slime. Another small yellow species is waxy but much drier and duller, and has more crowded gills.

Outside the waxcaps, small green or yellow-green grassland species such as the greenish Hygrocybe relatives and various little brown grassland agarics can be eliminated on gill texture. Waxcap gills are thick, distant and soft-waxy; almost everything else in the sward has thinner, more crowded and more brittle gills. A green cap with thin crowded gills and a dry stipe is not this species.

A Field Sequence

Old mossy grassland; small glossy fruitbody coated in clear slime from cap to stipe base; green at least somewhere, and green persisting longest at the stipe apex; thick, distant, waxy gills with a decurrent tooth; no ring, no bulb, no colour change on cutting; white spore print; autumn.