Splendid Waxcap

The Splendid Waxcap is among the most striking of the red Hygrocybe species, forming robust, deep scarlet fruitbodies that can stand out from many metres away in short green turf. It is noticeably larger and firmer than the common small red waxcaps and has a more solid stipe.

The species is strongly associated with old, nutrient-poor, often acidic grassland, particularly in western and upland districts with high rainfall. In several European countries it is treated as a species of conservation concern, and its presence is taken as evidence of a high-quality waxcap grassland.

A useful, if easily missed, character is the smell. Drying fruitbodies, and especially dried herbarium material, develop a sweet honey-like scent that separates the species from otherwise similar scarlet waxcaps.

Cap

The cap is 3-8 cm across, occasionally larger, convex then expanded and often slightly depressed with a wavy or lobed margin. Colour is a rich blood-scarlet to crimson, fading to orange-red or orange from the margin inwards in old or sun-bleached specimens. The surface is smooth, dry to faintly greasy, and typically has a slight sheen rather than the slime of some relatives.

Gills

Gills are thick, waxy, distant and broadly adnate to decurrent with a short tooth. They are yellow to orange-yellow, often paler than the cap and sometimes reddish near the cap edge, with obvious interveining.

Stipe

The stipe is stout, 4-9 cm tall and up to 1.5 cm thick, cylindrical or slightly compressed and grooved, dry, red to orange-red above and paling to yellow or whitish at the base. It is firm and solid or only narrowly hollow, with no ring or volva.

Flesh and spore print

The flesh is thick for a waxcap, yellowish to reddish under the cap cuticle, and does not change colour when cut. Fresh material may smell faintly of nothing at all, but a honey-like sweetness develops as the fruitbody dries. The spore print is white.

Splendid Waxcap grows in short, unimproved, often acidic grassland: upland sheep pasture, heathy grassland, cliff-top and coastal turf, and occasionally very old churchyard and lawn swards. It prefers well-drained, moss-rich ground that has been grazed or mown for a long period without fertiliser.

Fruiting is from late summer through autumn, peaking in October in oceanic climates. The species has a mainly north-western European distribution, with strongholds in Britain, Ireland, Norway and other Atlantic-influenced regions, and scattered records from the mountains of central Europe.

The mycelium occupies the moss and root layer of long-established turf and appears to have a biotrophic relationship with grassland plants or bryophytes rather than functioning as an ordinary saprotroph. Isotope studies of Hygrocybe consistently show signatures unlike those of litter-decaying fungi, and cultures are notoriously difficult to grow on standard media.

Colonies are slow to establish and extremely slow to recover from disturbance, which is why the species scores highly in grassland waxcap indices. Fruitbodies emerge in flushes after autumn rain and can appear repeatedly in the same few square metres year after year, marking the position of a long-lived underground network.

The Scarlet Waxcap (Hygrocybe coccinea) is similar in colour but smaller and more slender, with a moist, slightly greasy cap, gills that are more broadly adnate and often red-flushed, and no honey scent on drying. The Crimson Waxcap (Hygrocybe punicea) is larger still and very robust, but its cap is distinctly viscid when wet and its stipe is conspicuously fibrous-striate with a white base.

The Vermilion Waxcap (Hygrocybe miniata) is far smaller, with a dry, minutely scurfy cap surface visible with a hand lens. The Blackening Waxcap (Hygrocybe conica) can be red when young but has a conical cap and turns black on handling or with age, a change never seen in H. splendidissima.