Wood Woollyfoot
Gymnopus peronatus
Also called woolly foot, wood woolly-foot
A pliant, ochre-brown litter mushroom named for the dense woolly mat of pale hairs clothing the base of its stem and matting the surrounding leaves.
Overview
Gymnopus peronatus, once Collybia peronata, is an abundant autumn litter fungus of European and North American broadleaved woodland. The epithet means booted, describing the shaggy covering at the base of the stem, and the English name says the same thing.
It is a tougher, more leathery mushroom than most litter agarics, with pliant flesh that bends rather than snaps and a cap that is often slightly wrinkled or veined rather than smooth. Colours are warm: ochre, tan, honey and reddish brown, fading paler as the cap dries.
Where it fruits in quantity, whole patches of leaf litter are bound together by the yellowish white mycelium that also forms the stem's woolly boot.
How to identify it
Cap
The cap is 2-7 cm across, convex then flattened and often shallowly depressed, with a surface that is dry, matt and frequently finely wrinkled or radially veined. Colour ranges from ochre and yellowish tan to reddish brown, becoming buff or leathery pale as it dries; the margin is often slightly grooved.
Gills
Gills are fairly widely spaced and broad, narrowly attached to the stem, pale yellowish or cream at first and often developing reddish-brown or rust tints with age.
Stipe
The stem is 4-9 cm long and 2-6 mm thick, tough and pliant, pale yellowish buff to tan, more or less smooth in its upper part and clothed at the base in a dense, conspicuous woolly covering of whitish to yellowish hairs that mats fallen leaves around it.
Flesh and spore print
The flesh is thin, tough and leathery rather than brittle. The spore print is white to very pale cream.
Where and when it grows
Wood Woollyfoot fruits in the leaf litter of broadleaved woodland, especially beech and oak, and also occurs under conifers and in mixed woods. It grows scattered or in loose troops, sometimes in considerable numbers across a wide area of the woodland floor.
The main season is late summer through autumn, often continuing into early winter in mild conditions. It is common and widespread across Europe, and comparable populations occur in North America and temperate Asia.
Ecological role
The species is a leaf-litter saprotroph. Its mycelium permeates the litter layer, binding leaves into loose sheets and reducing them to pale skeletons as cellulose is consumed; the woolly stem base is simply an extension of this mycelial mat.
By attacking whole leaf blades rather than woody fragments, it complements the twig-decaying litter fungi found in the same woods, and successive seasons of colonisation are an important step in converting autumn leaf fall into humus.
Similar species
Gymnopus confluens grows in dense fused tufts and has a frosted coating of fine hairs along the entire stem rather than a woolly boot at the base, together with much more crowded gills. Gymnopus dryophilus has a smooth, bald, hollow stem with no woolly base and crowded white gills.
Gymnopus fusipes has a spindle-shaped, grooved, rooting stem and grows in tufts at the base of trunks and stumps rather than scattered in litter. Gymnopus erythropus has a smooth shining reddish stem lacking the shaggy base.