Stanhope, Weardale, County Durham: Out on a walk, I dust off my identification skills for some tricky grassland toadstools
The grassland toadstool season started early this year. These inkcaps weren’t here last week and they’ll soon vanish, leaving just a dark stain on the lawn. I think they must be the glistening inkcap but it’s hard to be certain. Heavy rain has washed away the diagnostic powdery scales that normally cover the cap. Earlier torrential downpours softened the earth, hard-baked by early summer drought, allowing these smooth, conical caps to shoulder it aside on their way to the surface. Now they are ragged around their rim, a sign of impending deliquescence into inky, spore-laden goo that will stick to flies’ feet, to be carried away to pastures new.
Every year, I struggle to refresh my identification skills for tricky brown grassland toadstools, without ever acquiring enough confidence for a fungal foray with a meal in mind; sitting on the edge of uncertainty isn’t conducive to comfortable eating. Scientific advances based on DNA analysis, renaming and reordering species have not helped, rendering some of my old field guides obsolete. They’ve renamed this one, learned in my youth as Coprinus, meaning “of dung”, as a Coprinellus. A misnomer either way: it doesn’t digest dung. This troop of toadstools is probably growing on decayed tree roots under the neatly mown grass.
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