Tony Hardware's Fungi Finds: Summer lock-down producing even more interesting species

On a trip locally again, this time to the area around Old Town Cove on the camel estuary, I discovered the unusual large spored resupinate Aleurodiscus aurantius and where it tends to grow on slender Rubus stems. Common name of Brier Disco for some reason. Nothing round about it until you see the spores! Amazing. At a home day with boredom a threat I thought why not check out old stems of garden plants, the ones that you never see in books or fungi quotes. Checking a odd-looking grass-like species which I later discovered was Miscanthus sinensis or Chinese Silvergrass (has a thin white sliver running through the centre of the leaf) I found tiny asco type species on last year's stems. On careful checking and with assistance from esteemed experts (thanks to Pauline Penna/Paul Cannon) I was able to claim this as Anthostomella tumulosa, probably the first noted find in the field in the UK - from my back garden!! There must be a great deal more species on garden plants out there and shouldn't be neglected just because they are domesticated. Fungi doesn't pre-select wild from garden, so I'll be looking harder in future. I'll probably restrict myself crawling around garden centres etc besides they are mostly new growth and you really need old. A trip to Little Petherick again provided some interesting ascos again. The main find though was a beautiful and uncommon species which turned into Leucoagaricus sublittoralis at home. Only few in SW England recorded. The ascos were Mazzantia angelicae and Diaporthe varians, both uncommon. A further visit the following day provided resupinate Exidiopsis calcea and asco discomycete Hyalorbilia inflatula - rarely reported but I'm sure this is neglected as looks like common disco fungi. Lastly, for this report and this was on 13th July 2020, I visited Par Market to check on some Amanitas I spotted before and found a pair rare Amanita franchetii fungi happily growing on a grassy knoll at the side of the car park. This will be the 3rd record for Cornwall, with the 2nd found the day before by a group member 30 miles away! My final visit was to a new favourite location for me which is Tredinnick Pits at NE Redmoor NR, near St Austell. Here I found an innocuous looking erupting asco on oak. Deciding that it looked slightly different it turned into a rare species for the UK, probably only 3/4th record with most other records from Cornwall. This was confirmed by Kew as being Amphirosellinia evansii. Great day all round and an amazing summer so far, considering we haven't even started the season yet!