Fungi encyclopedia
A reference for the fungi you actually find
Each entry describes one species the way you meet it in the field — the cap and its surface, what sits underneath, the stipe and its base, the spore print colour, the substrate it fruits from, and the species most often confused with it.
Showing results for “Magpie Inkcap”
Magpie Inkcap
Gilled
A tall, dramatic inkcap whose blackish-brown cap is broken into a pied pattern by large white felty veil patches. It stands singly in deep beech litter on lime-rich soils and dissolves into black ink within a day.
Spore print · Black
Goldenhaired Inkcap
Gilled
A small ochre-brown inkcap whose young cap is speckled with golden-brown veil granules; the gills blacken and deliquesce as the fruit body ages.
Spore print · Black
Midden Inkcap
Gilled
A miniature counterpart of the Shaggy Inkcap that lives on manure heaps, with a white scaly cylindrical cap, a slender ringed stem and the same rapid melt into black ink.
Spore print · Black
Snowy Inkcap
Gilled
A small, brilliantly white inkcap coated in a floury veil, growing on cow and horse dung in pasture. Its pure white cap darkens and dissolves to black within a day.
Spore print · Black
Scaly Inkcap
Gilled
A clustered inkcap whose buff-brown bell-shaped cap is decorated with felty whitish veil patches. It fruits in tufts on hardwood stumps and buried wood.
Spore print · Black
Pleated Inkcap
Gilled
A tiny, exquisitely pleated grey mushroom that opens like a paper parasol on lawns after rain and collapses by the afternoon. Its gills attach to a collar rather than the stipe.
Spore print · Black
Firerug Inkcap
Gilled
An inkcap identified by the rusty-orange felted mycelial mat, the ozonium, that carpets the wood it grows from. The tawny cap is grooved and dusted with pale granular veil.
Spore print · Black
Common Inkcap
Gilled
A clustered grey-brown inkcap whose egg-shaped cap opens into a ribbed bell and then digests itself from the rim inward, dripping away as black ink. It rises in dense tufts from buried wood in gardens, verges and woodland edges.
Spore print · Black
Fairy Inkcap
Gilled
A tiny pleated inkcap that fruits in swarming troops of hundreds around hardwood stumps, its pale buff bonnet-shaped caps carried on thread-thin white stems.
Spore print · Blackish brown
Hare's Foot Inkcap
Gilled
A short-lived inkcap whose young cylindrical cap is wrapped in dense silvery-white wool like a hare's foot, then expands, splits, and curls back within hours. Common on woodchip and litter.
Spore print · Black
Shaggy Ink Cap
Gilled
A tall, white, cylindrical mushroom clothed in shaggy upturned scales, whose gills pass from white through pink to black before dissolving into inky liquid. The movable ring and black spore print are confirming features.
Spore print · Black
Common Ink Cap
Gilled
A clustered grey inkcap with an egg- to bell-shaped, faintly scaly cap that splits at the grooved margin and dissolves upward into black liquid, growing in tufts from buried wood.
Spore print · Black
Grey Shag
Gilled
A tall, fragile inkcap of manure and composted straw, its ovoid grey cap coated in loose woolly veil fibres before it splits, curls and melts away into black ink.
Spore print · Black
Parasola auricoma
Gilled
A delicate pleated inkcap of mulch and path edges whose young cap carries scattered stiff brown hairs, visible with a hand lens, that give the species its golden-haired name.
Spore print · Black
Mica Cap
Gilled
A small tawny-honey inkcap with a deeply grooved cap sparkling with mica-like granules when fresh, fruiting in dense clusters at the base of hardwood stumps.
Spore print · Dark brown to blackish
Coprinellus radians
Gilled
A small tawny inkcap recognised less by the mushroom than by the conspicuous rusty-orange felted mat of mycelium, called an ozonium, that spreads across the wood beneath it.
Spore print · Blackish brown
Shaggy Mane
Gilled
A tall white cylindrical mushroom covered in shaggy upturned scales, whose gills blacken and dissolve into an inky liquid from the cap margin upward as it matures.
Spore print · Black
Mossy Maple Polypore
Polypores
A small perennial bracket that grows in overlapping clusters from wounds on living maples, instantly recognised by the carpet of green moss and algae that covers its cap and its very fine white pores.
Spore print · White
Maple Tar Spot
Other Fungi
An ascomycete that lacquers maple and sycamore leaves with glossy black, tar-like blotches ringed in yellow, then fruits from the fallen leaves the following spring.
Spore print · Not applicable
Fenugreek Milkcap
Gilled
A large, dry, felty fawn milkcap of bogs and wet birch woods, with scanty watery latex and a powerful aromatic odour of fenugreek that intensifies as specimens dry. It is a reliable indicator of wet, acid, peaty ground.
Spore print · Pale cream
Northern Tooth
Toothed
A massive tiered fungus that forms overlapping cream-coloured shelves high on living maple trunks, recognised by the crowded pendant spines that hang beneath each bracket instead of pores.
Spore print · White
Candy Cap
Gilled
A rusty orange-brown milkcap of the Pacific coast with a dry, faintly wrinkled cap and thin watery latex. Dried fruitbodies develop a powerful sweet aroma often likened to maple syrup or fenugreek.
Spore print · White to pale cream
Elm Oyster Mushroom
Gilled
A firm, pale, smooth-capped mushroom that grows from wounds on standing elms and maples, distinguished from true oysters by its stout central-to-eccentric stipe and gills that are notched rather than long-decurrent.
Spore print · White