Shaggy Scalycap Identification Guide

The first impression

Shaggy Scalycap is generally found at ground level, in a tight and rather aggressive-looking crowd. You are standing at the foot of a living ash, beech, apple or rowan in autumn, and packed against the base of the trunk is a dense clump of twenty or more caps, their stems fused into a common mass and curving outwards so every cap points away from the tree. The colour is a dry straw to ochre-yellow, and even from a couple of metres the caps look bristly rather than smooth, as if covered in a coat of small brown spikes. Nothing about the clump is slimy or shiny; the dryness is part of the impression and part of the identification.

Reading the cap

Caps are 4 to 12 cm across, convex at first and flattening with a broad low centre. The background colour is pale straw to warm ochre-yellow. Over it sit numerous coarse, pointed, recurved scales, brown to rusty-orange, arranged in rough concentric rings and standing up and outwards from the surface, densest towards the centre. Draw a finger over the cap and the scales catch against it.

The surface between the scales is dry and matt, which is a key point. Wet the cap with a drop of water and rub gently: it does not become sticky or slippery. The margin in young specimens is inrolled and hung with pale cottony veil fragments, which persist as a ragged fringe for some time.

The gills

Gills are attached to the stipe, adnate and often notched with a small tooth running a short way down the stem. They are crowded and narrow. Colour development is worth tracking: young gills are a pale straw-yellow, sometimes with a faint olive cast, and as the spores mature they shift through olive-brown to a definite rusty cinnamon. That yellow-to-rust progression, on a fungus that grows in tufts on wood, is a strong genus indicator.

On old specimens the gill faces are usually dusted rust-brown by falling spores, and the caps below any specimen in the clump will be similarly powdered.

Stipe, base and flesh

The stipe is 5 to 15 cm long, 1 to 2 cm thick, often curved and tapering downwards, and concolorous with the cap. It carries the same coarse recurved brown scales along its whole length below a distinct fibrous ring zone; above that zone it is smooth, paler and finely fibrillose. Running a finger from the top downwards, you feel a clean change from smooth to rough at the ring zone, and that boundary is one of the most reliable characters on the species.

The ring itself is not a broad membranous skirt but a shaggy, fibrous collar, sometimes tinged rusty from trapped spores.

Trace the stems downwards. They converge into a common fused base, usually welded to bark, exposed root or the buttress of a living tree. Splitting the base lengthways shows brownish, more discoloured flesh at the very bottom.

Elsewhere the flesh is firm and pale yellowish, deepening to rusty brown low in the stipe. It does not bruise blue or red; the only change is a slow darkening. Crush a piece of cap flesh and smell it: there is a distinct pungent note, variously read as radish-like or garlic-like, which is a real supporting character and quite unlike the mild woody smell of the honey fungus clumps that share the same habitat.

Taking a spore print

Select a cap that has fully flattened but is not collapsing, cut the stipe flush, and set the cap gills-down on white paper under a cover for four to eight hours. The deposit is a clear rusty to cinnamon brown. Compact it into a heap before judging the colour, since a thin film can look merely tan.

This single test does most of the heavy lifting in separating Shaggy Scalycap from the fungus it is most often confused with, because the honey fungus group deposits white.

Substrate, season and ecology

This species fruits at the base of living or recently dead standing broadleaved trees, and much less often on stumps or on conifers such as spruce. Ash, beech, apple, rowan, sycamore, birch and old orchard trees are all regular hosts. It enters through root or basal wounds and rots the wood there, which is why the clumps are so consistently placed at the collar of the trunk or over a large surface root rather than scattered over a log. Fruiting is concentrated in autumn, from late August through to the first frosts, and a colonised tree usually produces clumps in the same spot for several years running. Finding it is a reasonable indication of decay in the root plate and lower trunk.

Separating it from close look-alikes

Pholiota squarrosoides is the nearest relative and the toughest call. Its cap surface, beneath the scales, is viscid rather than dry, so wetting it produces a distinct tackiness. Its ground colour is whiter and its flesh whiter, its gills stay pale for longer, and it prefers fallen logs of beech and birch rather than the base of living trees.

Pholiota aurivella and Pholiota adiposa have bright golden caps that are frankly slimy, with flattened, appressed, gelatinous scales rather than upright spiky ones, and smoother stipes. They typically grow high up on beech or maple from wounds well above the ground.

Gymnopilus junonius forms large clumps on stumps and shares a rusty spore print, but it is a deeper orange-tawny, its cap is fibrillose and only finely scaly rather than coarsely bristling, and it carries a broad membranous ring rather than a shaggy fibrous zone.

Armillaria mellea and its relatives grow in the same position at the foot of living trees, but their caps are honey-yellow to tan with only sparse fine dark fibrils clustered around the centre, their gills are whitish to cream, they have a thick white membranous ring, and their spore print is white. Black bootlace strands under nearby bark are another giveaway.

Hypholoma fasciculare clusters on stumps with entirely smooth caps, greenish-sulphur gills and a purple-brown spore deposit.

Phaeolepiota aurea is superficially scaly and golden but grows on the ground in nettle beds and verges, has a granular rather than spiky surface and a large flaring ring.

Working order

Clump at a living trunk base; dry cap; coarse recurved brown scales on straw-yellow ground; scaly stipe below a fibrous ring zone, smooth above; gills yellowish then rusty; pungent radish-like smell; rusty-brown spore deposit. Run that list and the name is settled.