Yellow-tipped Coral Identification Guide

First impression and setting

This is a fungus you find on the woodland floor, not on wood. Autumn, a mature broadleaved wood on decent soil, beech or oak overhead, deep leaf litter, and a substantial coral-shaped mass pushing up through the leaves. Ramaria formosa is one of the larger woodland corals, reaching ten to twenty centimetres across and a similar height, and its colour makes an immediate impression: a soft apricot, salmon or pinkish-orange body whose branch tips are clearly a different, brighter yellow. That two-tone effect, warm pink-orange branches with contrasting lemon or golden tips, is the visual hook, and it is strongest in young, actively growing fruit bodies.

Overall architecture

Start with the whole structure before looking at parts. The fruit body is built like a small shrub: a single thick, fleshy, whitish base, sometimes several centimetres thick, buried in litter and often rooting into the humus, which divides into a few stout primary branches. These divide again and again, four to six orders of branching in a well-grown specimen, so that the fruit body becomes progressively finer toward the top. Branching is mostly in pairs, and the axils, the crotches between branches, are rounded and open rather than pinched. The final tips are short, blunt to slightly pointed, and typically divided into two or three tiny prongs.

The overall silhouette is broader than tall in mature material and it is dense: the branches crowd together into a fairly solid mass rather than standing apart in an open candelabrum.

Colour, top to bottom

Work down the fruit body noting where colours change.

• Tips. Bright chrome to lemon yellow when fresh and young, contrasting sharply with the branches below. Tips fade and dull with age, so an old fruit body may have lost most of the contrast. Always seek out a young one if there are several in the troop.
• Branches. Pinkish orange, salmon, apricot or a soft coral pink, usually strongest in the upper and middle branches and paler downward.
• Base. Whitish to pale cream, thick and fleshy, often with adhering soil and leaf fragments, and sometimes with white rhizomorphs radiating from it into the litter.

Texture, flesh and bruising

Break a branch. The flesh is white, firm and fleshy, and it breaks with a slightly fibrous to brittle snap; it is not gelatinous, elastic or rubbery. That texture check is worth making because it eliminates the jelly fungi at once.

Now handle a branch firmly between thumb and finger and set the fruit body down for ten minutes. In Ramaria formosa the pressed area typically discolours to a dull brownish, wine-brown or vinaceous tone, and older or weather-worn fruit bodies commonly show brown bruising along the branch faces where slugs have grazed or where litter has rubbed them. The absence of any bruising in a fresh, firm specimen is worth recording, since bruising behaviour is one of the working characters in this difficult genus.

The odour is faint and unremarkable, at most vaguely earthy or slightly sharp.

Spore print and microscopy

Getting a print from a coral fungus takes a little improvisation. Cut a section of branch tips and lay them on their side on white paper or a slide inside a closed container overnight; alternatively stand the whole fruit body over dark card. The deposit is yellow-ochre to warm ochre-yellow, a colour that also accumulates as a fine dust on the branches and on the litter beneath a mature specimen. Seeing that yellowish bloom on the leaves under a coral fungus is itself a useful field clue.

Microscopically the spores are ellipsoid to cylindric-ellipsoid, roughly 8 to 13 by 4 to 6 micrometres, and ornamented with fine warts or short oblique striations rather than being smooth. Basidia are four-spored, and clamp connections are present in the hyphae of the branches in this species group. Spore ornament and clamp presence are the standard tools for placing a Ramaria to section when field characters run out.

Habitat, partners and season

Ramaria formosa is ectomycorrhizal, forming root partnerships with broadleaved trees, particularly beech and oak, and it fruits on soil among leaf litter rather than on stumps or logs. It favours mature, undisturbed woodland on moderately rich, often calcareous soils. The season is autumn, generally from late summer to the first frosts. Fruit bodies appear singly, in small groups, or occasionally arranged along an arc where the mycelium has advanced through the litter. The name has been applied loosely in the past, and many records from outside Europe, especially in North America, refer to related but distinct species, so always record host trees, soil type and full colour notes with a find.

Separating the look-alikes on morphology alone

• Ramaria botrytis is stouter and more cauliflower-like, with a very large whitish base and short crowded branches whose tips are wine-red, purplish or crimson rather than yellow. Its spores are longer and longitudinally striate.
• Ramaria aurea is uniformly golden yellow throughout, branches and tips alike, without the pinkish or salmon body colour.
• Ramaria flava has sulphur to lemon-yellow branches on a white base and lacks the apricot-pink tones; its base bruises distinctly wine-brown.
• Ramaria stricta is instantly separated by substrate and shape: it grows on buried or exposed wood, its branches are straight, slender, parallel and upright like a bundle of sticks, the colour is pale tan to ochre, and the flesh bruises readily.
• Ramaria pallida and other pale species lack the yellow tips and the warm body colour altogether.
• Clavulina coralloides is smaller, pure white to greyish white, with characteristically crested or antler-like divided tips, and it gives a white spore print.
• Artomyces pyxidatus grows on decaying hardwood and has unmistakable crown-shaped tips, each branch ending in a ring of small points around a hollow centre.
• Calocera viscosa may look coral-like and is yellow, but it is gelatinous and rubbery rather than fleshy, much smaller, and attached by a white rooting base to conifer wood.

A working sequence

Confirm the fungus is fleshy rather than gelatinous. Confirm it grows from soil and litter, not from wood, by excavating the base. Check for a single massive whitish base rather than multiple separate stems. Look for the contrast between apricot-pink branches and bright yellow tips on the youngest fruit body in the group. Press a branch and wait for brownish bruising. Take an ochre-yellow spore deposit. With beech or oak overhead in autumn, that sequence gives Ramaria formosa in the European sense, and the notes you take along the way will be exactly what a specialist needs if the material turns out to belong to one of its close relatives.