Star Pinkgill

The Star Pinkgill is a small, slim, brown Entoloma of grassy places that owes its English name to a microscopic feature: its spores are cruciform, shaped like a four-armed star or cross, rather than the usual many-sided angular outline found elsewhere in the genus. That single character makes it one of the few small brown pinkgills that can be named with complete certainty.

In the field it is a typical Nolanea-type Entoloma: a conical to bell-shaped hygrophanous cap on a slender, brittle, silvery-fibrillose stipe, with gills that ripen from pale grey to pink. It is common and can appear from late spring right through to autumn.

Older literature uses the names Entoloma staurosporum and Rhodophyllus staurosporus for the same fungus, both referring to the star-shaped spores.

Cap

The cap is 1.5-4 cm across, conical to campanulate at first, expanding to broadly conical or flattened with a persistent pointed umbo. Moist caps are dark grey-brown to sepia and translucent-striate; drying caps fade to paler brown or ochre-buff with conspicuous silky radial streaking that gives a silvery sheen.

Gills

Gills are adnexed to almost free, fairly widely spaced, ventricose (belly-shaped), and pale grey to greyish-brown before flushing salmon-pink at maturity. The edges are even and the same colour as the faces.

Stipe

The stipe is 3-8 cm tall, very slender, cylindrical, hollow and fragile, grey-brown and strongly polished with silvery longitudinal fibrils. The base carries a small tuft of white mycelium. No ring, no volva.

Flesh and spore print

The flesh is thin, greyish-brown and watery, with a faint to moderate farinaceous smell. The spore print is pink. Under a microscope the spores are the clinching feature: cruciform, with four blunt arms radiating from the centre, quite unlike the polygonal spores of nearly all its relatives.

Star Pinkgill grows on soil among grass in a wide range of open habitats: pasture, lawns, road verges, churchyards, dune grassland, heathy turf, woodland rides and clearings, and occasionally on mossy banks. It has no strong soil preference and tolerates moderately disturbed ground.

Fruiting spans a long season from late spring through summer and autumn, with peaks after rain. The species is common and widespread throughout Europe and is recorded across temperate North America and northern Asia. Fruitbodies are usually scattered singly or in small loose groups within the sward.

The fungus is a saprotroph, feeding on dead grass roots, buried plant litter and the organic thatch layer of the turf. This nutritional independence from living plant partners allows it to colonise recently established, mown and otherwise disturbed grassland where root-associated grassland fungi are absent.

Mycelium persists in the topsoil year-round and fruits opportunistically whenever soil moisture and temperature allow, which is why the species appears over such a long season. It plays a routine role in nutrient cycling in grassland soils rather than acting as an indicator of habitat continuity.

Entoloma sericeum, the Silky Pinkgill, is the closest match in the field, sharing brown hygrophanous caps and grassland habitat, but its cap is more convex than conical and its spores are ordinary polygonal Entoloma spores. Microscopy separates them at once.

Other slender brown pinkgills such as Entoloma juncinum and Entoloma papillatum differ in cap shape, gill spacing and spore dimensions. Non-Entoloma look-alikes include Mycena species, which have white spore prints and smaller, more fragile fruitbodies with adnate gills, and Psathyrella species, which have dark brown to blackish spore prints and very brittle stipes. A pink print immediately rules those out.