Tony Hardware's Fungi Finds: February 2022

January is normally a fairly unproductive month due to frosts and the main fruiting season drifting away. However this month I was still able to find a few basidiomycetes of great interest as well as quite a few unusual ascomycetes as you would expect at this time of the year. Exploring the public accessible Cirencester Park once again first up I found on a very old pond remnant of Salix was Athelia Neuhoffii - new for Gloucs. Alongside this was also Exidiopsis calcea and Tomentellopsis echinospora - both rare for Gloucs. Also in the Park I found a tiny hypomycete living inside plant debris on Acer shown here as Bispora antennata and what appeared to be 'another' black raised smudge of Nemania. However, this was worth examination as it became N. effusa, with just a few UK records. Probably common but who checks black smudges these days!! At Painswick Beacon, close to heathland here was an old deteriorating Pinus plantation, which of course is excellent for fungi. First up was a tiny discomycete in Calycina conorum normally only found on this substrate. Very rare and only record for Sth. West/East and Wales. Also here on broken rotting wood was only described as Helotium cf. vernum, a scalloped edged discomycete. No other records noted in UK. Another grey dusting of resupinate was found to Tubulicrinus accedens - 1st for Gloucs., with not many other UK records, other than those I found in Cornwall last year!! These have wonderful shaped cystidia, this one with a paddle type. Tucked away on its own close to the Heath was a solitary Entoloma. Must be interesting at this time of year and proved to be in Entoloma vernum, dark chocolate capped with small pronounced umbo. At Leasowe Woods a tiny Mycena type was found under a fallen branch after careful microscopy and showing clearly lemon shaped spores was Hemimycena cephalotricha. Not many, if any have spores like this within Mycena. 1st for West Midlands. Lastly, and growing on Abies alba debris was a Pluteus shouting loudly as P. cerinus, but being solo on conifer I thought I should check this. Sure enough this turned out to be the lookalike P. pouzarianus that can only be checked under the scope, with clamped cap hyphae, in this case 15 -20% of the time but not so widely known was the vastly larger pleurocystidia of this species verses P. cerinus. A great month, thanks perhaps to mild weather.