Tony Hardware's Fungi Finds: MAY 2025 - Uncommon to rare species recorded this month

The warm weather continued in May with hardly any rain during the month, so I expected it would be a tough time to find fungi, if any. However, early in the month at a visit to Hellen's House in Herefordshire I collected a few Agrocybe sps growing in grass in a shaded position. These worked out to be A. molesta or Bearded Fieldcap, so that was a good start. But that was it! I did find a few other basidiomycetes in the form of resupinates with Ceripora spissa on Salix at Cotswold Water Park, which has a glorious soft orangey cheesy feel to the surface and Peniophore boidinii, found on Dog Rose at the bottom of my garden! Both uncommon species. A visit again to Cirencester Park produced an unusual Mollisia type species in Tapesia lividofusca, however the bigger surprise was seeing another species in the camera at home showing a delightful hairy yellow very small discomycete which I had missed entirely due to its size visually! Looking closer this turned out to be what appears to be only the 2nd record in the UK for Amicodisca svrekii. Amazing. Key here was yellow exudate clinging to the hairs of this species. During an opportunist look along a canal at Blunder Lock nr Stonehouse, I came upon Botryosphaeria festucae, quite rare and with unusual large ascospores being 7th UK record, on a dead Dicot stem I couldn't work out. Back to one of my local patches at Climperwell this time at the top end fields where farmers are more often leaving wild edges to their crops. Terrific. Here I recorded Cericospora polygonacaerum on Fallopia, 9th UK record plus Phaeosphaeria nigrans and Stagonospora vitensis on grasses, the latter 1st for Gloucs. Also at Hellen's House was Coniochaeta ligniaria with very unusual 4 and 8-spored asci. Not seen that before in the same collection. 1st for Herefordshire. Lastly, back to Climperwell Under a wet branch and growing as parasitic fungus enveloping a fly pupa was Pandora dipterigena. Macabre, but fungi couldn't care less! Few other county records.