All Mushrooms A-Z, Grouped by Edibility

How the mushroom index is organized

The index sorts every species by edibility, from choice edible down to poisonous, so the first thing you learn about a mushroom is whether it can hurt you. Search by common or scientific name when you know what you are after, or jump to a tier and browse what sits in it. Each tier describes a species that someone has already identified correctly. It tells you nothing about a mushroom you picked until that identification is secure, and the edibility ladder shows how the six tiers relate to each other.

What does each edibility tier mean?

Choice edible species are the ones cooks and foragers prize for flavor and texture. The chanterelle sits here, and its profile still lists the poisonous species people confuse with it. The tier label holds only for a correct identification, so the lookalike check comes before any cooking.

The edible tier covers everyday table mushrooms that are safe once properly identified and cooked. Shiitake needs that cooking: eaten raw or partly cooked, it can cause a streaked rash, and heat breaks down the lentinan behind it. The rash usually begins about 48 hours after the meal and lasts about 10 days.

The caution tier holds species that are edible only after specific preparation, or that make some people ill. Morels belong here, and CDC investigators tied a 2023 Montana outbreak to eating them raw or undercooked. On every caution profile, the preparation notes are part of the safety advice, and skipping them can make you ill.

People take medicinal species as powders, teas or supplements. The label describes that use and makes no safety promise: one case report describes kidney injury in a person who took 10 to 15 grams of chaga a day with 500 mg of vitamin C. None of these profiles replaces medical advice, so talk to a clinician before you use one of these species.

Inedible species are not toxic, and they are too tough or bitter to be worth eating. The bitter bolete is the classic case, since one specimen can spoil a whole meal and cooking makes the bitterness worse. Some people cannot taste that bitterness at all, so their tongue gives them no warning.

Poisonous is the red tier, and some species in it are deadly. The death cap is behind most deaths from amatoxin mushrooms and is often mistaken for the paddy straw mushroom. You learn a species in this tier only so you can recognize it and leave it alone.

What a profile can and cannot tell you

Each profile opens with a color-coded safety banner, then covers identification features, dangerous lookalikes, habitat and season. Culinary, medicinal or growing notes follow where they apply, and named sources let you check each field mark against the account it came from. The tier mark on the banner is the same one the index uses, so the profile and the list show the same rating.

Names do not always travel cleanly between regions. DNA work on porcini found separate geographic lineages that limit how far a European name applies, and the field mushroom group in North America needs more than features you can see by eye to name. So a profile built from European accounts may not describe the mushroom that carries the same name where you live.

Some groups defeat appearance altogether. Amatoxin testing across the Galerina marginata complex, which includes the deadly galerina, showed the limits of morphology for naming its lineages.

How do lookalikes and field marks work?

Lookalikes share enough shape, color or habitat with a sought-after species to pass a quick look. The features that separate them are often small, so a safe call rests on several marks checked together on the whole mushroom. French food-safety guidance backs that up at the picking stage: keep species separate, collect whole sound specimens and never eat wild mushrooms raw.

Chanterelles have blunt false gills that look like wrinkles or ridges, with no separate blades. The jack-o'-lantern has true gills and grows in clusters on wood, while the chanterelle comes up from the ground in mossy forest. Eating a jack-o'-lantern typically brings nausea and vomiting one to three hours later, often with stomach pain and dizziness.

True morels are hollow inside, and that cut is the first check against the false morel. Some false morels contain gyromitrin, which high heat only partly breaks down. The hollow test has limits of its own. The half-free morel has a cap attached only about halfway down the stem, a shape that makes the cut harder to read than on other true morels.

Young green-spored parasols with white gills are nearly inseparable by sight from the shaggy parasol. The spore print separates them: dull grayish green for the poisonous species, and white for the shaggy parasol.

Amanitas are where whole-specimen checks matter most. Their defining features are free white gills, a white spore print, a ring and a volva, and those features run through the whole Amanita family. That family puts the destroying angels beside Caesar's mushroom, a choice edible.

Some of the worst mix-ups involve prized species. People who believed they had collected matsutake developed stomach symptoms and then delayed kidney failure in a case series that points to Amanita smithiana. One later case review describes stomach symptoms within about six hours and kidney damage over one to four days.

The deadly webcap carries a delayed kidney risk, and people have confused it with trumpet chanterelles. Its toxin, orellanine, causes kidney injury that often shows up late, when treatment has limits, and its relatives the blood-red webcap and the tawny webcap are poisonous too.

The taxonomy hubs: type, habitat, season, region, spore print and family

Beside the edibility tiers, the taxonomy hubs group the same profiles by one feature at a time, from region to evolutionary family. They narrow a search quickly, and most of them put edible and poisonous species side by side. Treat each hub as a shortlist of candidates, because none of them can tell you that the mushroom you found is safe.

Mushroom type sorts by body shape. Gilled mushrooms form the largest group and include the death cap and the destroying angel along with oyster mushroom and shiitake. Boletes carry pores under the cap, from porcini to the poisonous devil's bolete, while polypores such as reishi, turkey tail and maitake mostly grow as brackets or clumps on wood. The morel type includes the false morel next to the true morels, the chanterelle type adds the black trumpet, and the tooth fungi are lion's mane and the hedgehog mushroom.

Habitat separates species by how they feed. Mycorrhizal species partner with the roots of living trees, so the host tree becomes a clue for chanterelles, porcini and the Amanitas. Wood decomposers live on dead or dying wood, which puts oyster mushroom and shiitake in the same group as the jack-o'-lantern and the scaly inkcap.

The saprotrophic hub covers species that break down litter, compost and grass, including the freckled dapperling of gardens and woodland edges. Habitat narrows a search without settling it, because many unrelated fungi can produce lawn rings or arcs. So a ring of mushrooms on your lawn shows how they feed and leaves the species open.

Season follows the fruiting window in each profile. The spring hub holds the morels, and also the false morel and the western destroying angel, which fruits from late winter through spring. Fall holds the largest list, while year-round species include cultivated shiitake and perennial brackets such as agarikon and the red-belted conk.

Region follows the range in each profile's sources. Regional labels mark where those sources place a species, and a name that fits one region may not fit the same-looking mushroom in another. East Asia holds shiitake, reishi and cordyceps, and North America holds the chanterelle, the jack-o'-lantern and the morels. Europe holds the death cap, the fly agaric and the panther cap, all poisonous.

Spore print groups species by the color of the spores a cap drops. The death cap and destroying angel leave a white print, just as oyster mushroom and shiitake do, so a white print never clears a mushroom. The cream print puts the chanterelle beside the jack-o'-lantern, and the true morels beside the false morel. The brown print joins the brown roll-rim and the sulphur tuft, two poisonous species with very different shapes.

Family groups species by evolutionary relationship, and edible and toxic species often share one. Omphalotaceae holds shiitake together with the jack-o'-lantern and the ghost fungus. Hymenogastraceae holds the deadly galerina and the liberty cap, both poisonous.

Tricholomataceae holds matsutake and wood blewit along with the poisonous yellow knight and the tiger knight. Agaricaceae puts the field mushroom beside the poisonous yellow stainer and the deadly dapperling. In each case the family tells you about ancestry, while the edibility tier on each profile tells you about the plate.

Cantharellaceae is the chanterelle family, with the white chanterelle of Pacific Northwest conifer forest. Boletaceae and Morchellaceae cover the classic boletes and the true morels.

What should you do if someone eats a wild mushroom?

If anyone, including a child or a dog, may have eaten a wild mushroom you cannot name, contact Poison Control right away. Do it before symptoms start, and do not make the person vomit. The first steps after a suspected poisoning start with that call. Waiting is dangerous, because amatoxin vomiting and diarrhea usually begin about 6 hours after eating, with liver enzymes rising at about 24 hours.

Cooking does not make a deadly species safe, since amatoxins survive heat. The symptom timeline shows how the hour symptoms begin shapes a doctor's assessment, and amatoxin poisoning covers the liver injury and hospital care.