Another mushroom chalked up for my garden. This one was growing from earth beside an old fence with its mycelium on the wood, I think. Small brown mushrooms are hard to identify and this one didn’t give me enough spores for a spore print, but I’ve very tentatively assigned it as Psathyrella lutensis…  probably completely wrong!

I’ve been looking under some fir trees in Ladywell for a long time, expecting to find something interesting, and this year I did. I already recorded the Wood Blewits in my blog on 20th Nov, but I got some nice pictures this time. Apart from the ones under the fir trees they were also growing in a completely different place near some large sycamores, so that’s three different sites where they’ve appeared in the park this year.

The Agaricus is a bit of a poser… Agaricus gennadii is the closest match I can find. I also saw one of these on the 20th in the same place, but with a much longer stem. (This time the stem was very squat and bulbous.) The pictures were very poor on that occasion due to the fading light, but I’ve included one, for comparison. My spores are too round, they should be elliptical, but I can’t find any type of Agaricus with my spores and with the other characteristics being correct. Also the smell is perhaps questionable – it should be strong and unpleasant. One of mine did smell unpleasant and the other didn’t really, but my two specimens were very old and that makes the smell evidence a bit unreliable.

Just a small brownish mushroom growing in my garden, but it is a species that I’ve not found before: Aromatic Pinkgill (Entoloma pleopodium)… these things just pop up, one or two of them, and then are gone. This looked like a fairly boring species of Bonnet until I saw the spores under a microscope – almost star-shaped, but certainly angular and spikey. This seems to be a characteristic of the Entoloma genera, and I’ve not found so many of these recently. So I looked for fungi with star shaped spores and although there’s quite a few, that was enough get me to an identification very quickly.

Lots more mushrooms in Ladywell Fields…

I have been looking for Field Blewits for 30 years and now I’ve found them in the local park! My mushroom adventures started with a find of Field Blewits at Warwick University, and they’re so distinctive that despite my total ignorance (at the time) I was able to identify and consume them. (The lilac stipe and perfumed smell are all you need.) So I’ve always been on lookout for some more, but nothing until now, even though they’re supposed to be common. Great to eat, and so I did.

Also some more Flowery Blewits. Almost identical to the Field Blewits apart from the absence of lilac colouring. I’m not absolutely certain of my identification here – Roger Phillips says they’re uncommon and does a patch of grass on the edge of Ladywell Fields with one or two trees count as ‘open woodland’?

I occasionally see Common Inkcaps but this is the first time I’ve managed to photograph them. And the other interesting find was a Parasol Mushroom. Quite impressive, one of my favourites, and very common, but again not something I was expecting to find in the park. This is another species that stirred my interest many years ago, when I found a colony growing in a pine wood in Hampshire.

Nice to find some Wood Blewits in the park – they’re very common but I’ve only found them in woods proper before, not parkland. I tucked into these.

I went back to look at a Branching Oyster which was very immature when I saw it on the 5th – 2 weeks ago. But this time I got a spore sample and realised that it must be a Veiled Oyster instead! The pictures in my books don’t fit so well, but I’m fairly sure after doing some further investigation of pictures on the web. The young specimens from earlier are particularly distinctive, although lacking the ring zone. Also the habit of growing from cracks/holes is distinctive of this species. I ate this, believing it to be a Branching Oyster. Collins Fungi Guide/Buczacki doesn’t specifically say if it’s edible but other Oysters are, and it didn’t do me any harm. Very nice it was too – firm and almost crunchy.

Actually I regret not eating The Prince as well – it’s very, very tasty. I’ve been seeing Prince-like mushrooms around in the park for a while and so had my doubts about definite identification, but this one is definitely a Prince.

Knole Park was fungally fabulous two months ago so I decided to go back. Actually I’m exaggerating – it was only pretty good last time, but it’s easy to get to and has a variety of unimproved habitats, which is what the fungi folk generally prefer. I’m turning into a fungus species ticker – 9 new species registered on this foray!

I walked through the gate to the nearest patch of grass and immediately found a large sprouting of Golden Spindles and various Waxcaps. The Spindles were very striking, and not something I’ve ever seen before, so I wasn’t sure at first whether it was a fungus at all or some kind of plant! I also saw some Rose Spindles but didn’t even take a picture – at the time I thought it was a variant colour of the species that I did record. There were many types of Waxcap, and again I’m not so familiar with this genus, so I got a bit overwhelmed and certainly missed a few. With a bit of guesswork I think that I found Honey Waxcap, Golden Waxcap, Meadow Waxcap and Vermillion Waxcap, although some of these are easy to confuse with each other.

Another point of interest was the possible small fungus growing on an old Oyster Mushroom. It was tiny, and I should have kept a specimen to examine under a magnifying glass, as now I’m not sure whether it really was a mushroom. The Shaggy Parasol was a fine photogenic specimen indeed, and the large old decrepit Parasol was the biggest I’ve ever seen – shame I wasn’t there to witness its full glory.