Southern Bracket Identification Guide

First Impression And Setting

The Southern Bracket is a heavyweight. You find it at the base of a living or recently dead broadleaf tree - beech above all, but also oak, lime, ash, plane, poplar, elm, horse chestnut and street trees generally - in woodland, parkland, avenues and gardens. It is perennial, so it is present in every month of the year, and a single bracket may sit on the same trunk for a decade.

What you see first is a large, dark, hard shelf projecting from the trunk, usually low down, between ground level and about two metres. It is commonly 10-40 cm wide and can exceed half a metre, and it is genuinely heavy - lift a fallen one and it feels like a piece of timber. The upper surface is dull, lumpy and often thickly powdered with cocoa-brown dust, and in fruiting season the same brown dust coats the bark below, the ivy, the leaf litter and anything else within a metre. That dusting is often visible from further away than the bracket itself.

Reading The Upper Surface And Crust

The bracket is sessile - broadly attached to the trunk with no stalk - and shaped like a thick semicircular shelf, a lumpy hoof, or an irregular mass where several have fused. In profile it is thick, often 5-12 cm deep at the point of attachment, tapering toward the margin.

The upper surface is covered by a hard crust, dull and matt rather than varnished, coloured dark brown, grey-brown, umber or almost black, and marked with concentric ridges, furrows and lumpy growth zones that record successive seasons. The active growing margin is a band of white to cream or pale ochre, sometimes several centimetres wide in the growing season, which hardens and darkens as the year goes on. Old brackets are frequently colonised by moss, algae and lichen and can look like a lump of bark.

Now the crust test, which is central to separating this species from its nearest relative. Press hard on the upper surface with a thumbnail. In the Southern Bracket the crust is thick - often 1-2 mm - and hard, and it resists denting; you can push firmly without leaving a mark.

Reading The Pore Surface

Turn to the underside, or crouch and look up at it. The pore surface is flat to slightly convex, white to pale cream when fresh, and finely porous - roughly 4-6 pores per millimetre, round and small enough that they look smooth from a metre away.

Scratch it lightly with a twig or fingernail. It bruises instantly and permanently to dark brown, so cleanly that you can draw on it, which is why brackets of this genus are known as artist's conks. This immediate brown bruising, combined with fine white pores, is one of the most useful field characters the species has. Older, spore-covered pore surfaces go dull brownish of their own accord and bruise less obviously, so test near the growing margin.

Cutting It Open

If you can, take a wedge out of the bracket with a strong knife or saw - this is where the perennial architecture becomes visible and the identification is finished.

Below the pore surface you find the tube layer, and below that another, and another. Each year's growth adds a new stratum of tubes, usually 5-15 mm deep, and the layers are separated by thin partings of brown context tissue. Counting them gives a rough age for the bracket.

Above the tubes sits the context - the flesh of the fungus. In the Southern Bracket it is woody-corky, fibrous, and coloured dark reddish-brown to chocolate or coffee brown, usually fairly uniform and dense. Look carefully for pale streaks. In this species white mycelial flecks and pockets in the context are absent or few, and the context does not send white veins up into the crust.

The flesh does not exude anything, does not change colour dramatically on cutting beyond darkening slightly, and is far too tough to tear by hand.

Spore Print And Microscopy

You barely need to try: a mature bracket sheds so heavily that the trunk beneath it, and the top of the bracket itself, are permanently coated. If you want a clean deposit, slide a sheet of white paper or a glass slide onto the trunk directly under the pore surface and leave it a few hours on a still day.

The deposit is cocoa-brown to rusty or cinnamon-brown. Under the microscope the spores are unmistakable and settle the genus at once: ovoid to ellipsoid, distinctly truncate at one end as though the tip had been snipped off, pale brown, and double-walled, with the outer wall separated from the ornamented inner wall by minute pillars that look like fine spines or pits. Size is roughly 7-12 by 5-8 micrometres, with this species running toward the larger end.

Substrate, Season And Ecology

The Southern Bracket is a butt and heart rot fungus. It colonises the trunk base and root collar of standing broadleaf trees, usually through a wound, an old pruning cut or damaged roots, and digests lignin and cellulose to produce a white rot in the heartwood. The tree can live for many years with an established infection, adding reaction wood around a progressively hollowing core, and the fungus continues as a saprotroph on the stump and fallen trunk after the tree dies.

Because it is perennial, the bracket itself is a year-round feature. New growth and spore release concentrate in the warmer half of the year, typically late spring through autumn.

Separating It From Look-alikes By Structure

Artist's Bracket (Ganoderma applanatum) is the critical comparison and is often found on the same tree species. It forms a thinner, flatter, more plate-like bracket; its upper crust is thin and brittle and dents easily under thumbnail pressure; its context is a lighter, paler brown, typically shot through with conspicuous white mycelial flecks and pockets, some of which run up into the crust; and its spores average slightly smaller. It is also the usual host of a small fly whose larvae produce distinctive nipple-like or pimple-like galls scattered across the pore surface - if you see those galls, you are almost certainly looking at G. applanatum.

Lacquered brackets (Ganoderma lucidum, G. resinaceum, G. pfeifferi) have a shiny, varnished-looking upper surface in red-brown, chestnut or coppery tones, and the first two are annual and often develop a lateral stalk. Their crusts soften or blister when heated.

Hoof Fungus (Fomes fomentarius) is also a hard perennial hoof, but its crust is smooth and grey to grey-brown with sharp concentric bands, its pore surface is pale brown and does not bruise strongly dark, its context is a soft fibrous tawny-brown, and its spore print is white. It is chiefly on birch and beech.

Red-belted Bracket (Fomitopsis pinicola) has a resinous, sticky, brightly banded margin in red and orange, a white to pale yellow context, a white spore print, and it causes a brown cubical rot mainly on conifers.

Rigidoporus ulmarius forms enormous, lumpy, cream to whitish brackets, often greened by algae on top, with a pinkish to buff pore surface, most typically on elm.

Phellinus and Fuscoporia species have brown pore surfaces and rusty-brown context.

Field Checklist

Large heavy perennial bracket at the base of a broadleaf tree; hard, thick, dull dark crust resisting a thumbnail; white to cream growing margin; fine white pores bruising instantly dark brown; stacked annual tube layers; dark reddish-brown woody context with few or no white flecks; cocoa-brown spore dust coating everything below; truncate double-walled brown spores.