Saprotrophic Mushrooms: Habitat and Fruiting Pattern

What do these mushrooms grow on?

Saprotrophic mushrooms live on dead material and need no living host. The members here grow on rotting logs and stumps, wood chips and leaf litter. Others use compost, manure-rich straw and the rich soil of lawns, gardens and verges.

People make and keep many of those places. Mulch beds, wood-chip paths, compost heaps and lawns all feed these mushrooms. That brings species such as the Deadly Dapperling close to homes, gardens and parks.

Saprotrophic describes how a mushroom feeds and says nothing about edibility. The group runs from cultivated Enoki to two species that can cause fatal liver failure.

The deadly members of yards and wood chips

Both amatoxin members turn up in ground that people manage. Fool's Conecap is a small rusty-spored mushroom of decaying wood, wood chips and compost. The deadly dapperling, which some guides call deadly parasol, is a small scaled Lepiota of lawns, gardens, parks and mulch.

Deadly Galerina, also called autumn skullcap, sits in the wood-decomposer hub but fruits in the same wood chips and mulch. Cooking, drying and freezing do not make any of them safe. Even a few small deadly galerina fruiting bodies may contain enough amatoxin to cause severe poisoning.

Finding a ring on the stem does not make a little brown mushroom safer. In fool's conecap the membranous ring is part of the deadly pattern, and weather can tear it away before anyone finds the mushroom.

Lawn rings and the muscarine funnels

Fool's Funnel, which many guides also call ivory funnel, is a small whitish lawn mushroom with crowded gills running down a ringless stem. It often fruits in arcs or rings. It contains muscarine, and the sweating, salivation and breathing symptoms can begin within minutes.

The ring in the grass only describes how the mushrooms grew, and one ring can hold more than one species. If a single ring holds more than one gill pattern, you reject the whole collection.

Edible saprotrophs and their dangerous neighbors

Each edible member comes with its own check or handling step:

• Shaggy Parasol: a white spore print, because the poisonous green-spored parasol prints green and every visible character overlaps
• Wood Blewit: a bare stem and a pale pinkish buff print, which separate it from purple webcaps that can cause kidney failure
• Shaggy Mane: young white specimens cooked the same day, with care over the treated lawns and roadsides where it grows
• Enoki: cooked through and never eaten raw, because Listeria outbreaks traced to imported packets have killed people

Two poisonous wood-growers resemble mushrooms people collect. Angel Wing looks like a white oyster on decayed conifer wood. In 2004 it caused an outbreak of acute encephalopathy in Japan, with 59 patients and 17 deaths. Sulphur Tuft forms tight yellow clusters on dead wood. Its greenish mature gills are the strongest quick warning against edible Hypholoma lookalikes.