Tony Hardware's Fungi Finds: Treraven Woods, Wadebridge

Time for a short foray into my local woods on a drizzly afternoon, but once on the Camel Trail you tend to be covered most of the way and of course when in the woodland. I first came upon a colony of the delightful colourful Sarcoscypha austriaca or Scarlet Elfcup under a canopy of mossy hazel, some on twigs others on soil. I tested for the rarer S. coccinea without conviction and the spores pointed to the former as you would expect. Further up the trail an isolated rotting beech log deserved a second look underneath and I was rewarded with the tiny white cups of Lachnum sps. These needed inspection at home under the microscope and once completed the less common L. brevipilosum showed itself, especially due to the substrate it grew upon and the size of hairs on the cups themselves (see enlargement at x40. Wondering further up the track at the hill top the woodland disappears and you enter a local youth education nature centre. Here I saw a brilliant large wood chip pile and my expectations shot up. Sure enough a whole array of different shaped Peziza vesiculosa or Blistered Cup was growing amongst the wood chippings. At the rear of the stack I located a few additional agarics in the shape of Psathyrella, and these turned out to be P. corrugis or Red Edged Brittlestem. Not surprising as they love this type of habitat. My eyes widen even further when coming across a large single mushroom growing out of the wood chip but on inspection had a longish rooting stem, thick stem with heavy veil remnants and veil still attached to the cap, and a surprising scented smell at first which disappeared quickly. This took me ages to see what this could be searching through tons of literature and online where I couldn't find anything that contained a large rooting stem that was anything like the rest of the macro features. This was answered through my colleague and Chair of the Cornwall Recording Group, Pauline Penna, who suggested Agrocybe rivulosa, as being seen regularly on wood chip and matched most of the features of this specimen. This turned out to be only the 5th for the county, Pauline seeing two of these this century! Apparently spreading in the UK due to the use of imported wood chip across gardens.