What Is a Wood Blewit? Spore Print and Webcap Lookalikes

Wood blewits are solid lilac gilled mushrooms that come up in leaf litter late in the year, with thick violet stems and gills of the same color when young. The color fades from the middle outward as the mushroom ages. Older caps turn tan or buff on top, and the lilac survives longest at the margin and on the stem. Expect that fading, because photographs of a young one and an old one look like two different mushrooms.

The old name blue leg points at the part that keeps its color, and on a mature specimen the stem is usually the most strongly lilac part. Blewit itself is a worn-down form of blue hat, which fits a young cap and misses most of the ones people find. Notice the cap margin early, too. It stays rolled under far longer than on most gilled mushrooms of this size, so a blewit often looks slightly tucked in at the edge even after the cap has flattened.

Six characters are available, and two of them do the work. The other four are supporting evidence, and people go wrong with this mushroom when they treat those four as the decision. Smell shows the problem best. It is genuinely distinctive, and most people recognize it after one or two specimens, yet it still cannot name a mushroom on its own.

The measurements mark the wood blewit as a substantial mushroom. First Nature's wood blewit account gives the cap and stem sizes in the table below, along with the crowded notched gills, the faint aniseed smell and the pale print.

On this mushroom the spore print is no formality, and it takes hours, so plan it the evening before. Cut the stem off flush, lay the cap gills down on white paper, cover it with a bowl and leave it overnight.

Pale prints look faint on white paper, so lay the cap across the join between a white sheet and a dark one. Read the result in daylight, away from a kitchen bulb, and tilt the paper so the light rakes across it. At first a pale print reads more as a texture than a color. Warm indoor light also pushes everything toward buff, the exact shade this test turns on.

If this is your first print, the full method for taking spore prints covers the steps, and only the paper is specific to this mushroom. The rusty brown of the dangerous group is strong enough to read on either color.

Cook wood blewits thoroughly, and never eat them raw. Raw blewit causes stomach upset, so the rule goes beyond texture or a general caution about wild food. Cook them properly, not briefly, in a hot pan held long enough to drive the water off and brown the pieces. Neither a quick sear nor a salad suits this mushroom.

Even well cooked, wood blewits disagree with some people, and those reports come often enough to plan for.

Clean them dry. Brush the leaf litter off instead of rinsing, since the thick flesh soaks up water readily, and trim the base where soil has gripped the fibres.

The flavor is distinctive and divides people. The aniseed note in the raw flesh carries into the pan as something floral and slightly perfumed, which some people love and others find soapy. Wood blewits also hold their texture, staying firm where many autumn mushrooms collapse, so they suit stews, cream sauces and anything cooked slowly.

Leave older specimens with brown gills. Their color has gone, their texture has softened, and the identification gets harder on exactly the character that counts most.

The wood blewit is saprotrophic, breaking down fallen leaves with no living tree as a partner. That makes it far less fussy about place than most woodland mushrooms. It fruits in mixed woodland leaf litter, along hedge bottoms, under garden shrubs and straight out of compost heaps.

Arcs and rings are common where the fungus has lived a while. It spreads outward through the leaf litter and fruits at its advancing edge, so the curve marks the growing front, with nothing special buried underneath.

Timing is the second reason this mushroom draws attention. The blewit is one of the last species fruiting in the autumn season, carrying on well after most others have finished. Frost changes its look without ending the run. After a hard night a blewit can look washed out and watery next to the same species in October.

That late season puts it in front of the wrong audience. People out walking in November are usually not foragers, and a bright lilac mushroom in a bare hedge is exactly the kind of find that someone who has never taken a spore print picks up.

The wood blewit is one of the few good wild woodland edibles you can genuinely grow at home, because it eats dead leaves and needs no living roots. Sow spawn into an outdoor bed of leaf mold, straw and compost in a shaded corner, and it will fruit in autumn, sometimes for several years running. It establishes slowly and fruits on its own schedule, so treat it like a fruit tree more than a windowsill kit.

Small-scale commercial growing exists and has never grown large. The mushroom bruises easily and its color fades in transport, and faded blewits are hard to sell to buyers expecting lilac.

Cooked wood blewits carry the ordinary profile of a substantial wild gilled mushroom, which is mostly water with some protein, B vitamins, potassium and a useful amount of fiber. The flesh is denser than most autumn species of the same size, so a given weight shrinks less in the pan. The species sits among the edibles that carry a caution, and that caution covers both the cooking and the print. None of that explains why people pick one. They pick it for its beauty, for arriving when nothing else does, and for holding together in a slow dish.

Older books file this mushroom under Clitocybe nuda, and some still do, so the same species can sit under two names on one bookshelf. The move to Lepista followed the spores more than the look of the mushroom. Blewit spores have rough walls and a pale pinkish color, and as Fungus Fact Friday's account of Lepista nuda explains, that set them apart from the funnel-shaped, white-spored group they had shared.

Grouping these mushrooms by color alone can lead you to the wrong identification. Mycologists once grouped purple mushrooms together, assuming that a striking shared color meant shared ancestry, and spore work took that apart. Wood blewits and purple webcaps look alike for a reason that has nothing to do with kinship. Violet pigments turn up again and again in unrelated fungi, so color cannot carry an identification.