Basidia: 2-4 spored.
Habitat & Distribution: Found on the ground in woods, especially pine woods; also on heathland growing up vegetation and incorporating it into the fruit-body’s shape.
General Information: There is some evidence to suggest that this fungus can form mycorrhiza with pine trees under certain conditions.
Although it may be easily passed over because it is perfectly camouflaged it is quite easy to recognise when collected. T. palmata (Bulliard) Patouillard, is a bigger, less frequently seen species more coral-like in shape; it also grows in pine woods. When the fruit-body of T. terrestris spreads over the soil or plant debris it resembles other members of the family to which it belongs, i.e. Thelephoraceae; species of Tomentella. They also have warty angular spores, purplish brown colours, and wrinkled or puckered spore-bearing surfaces. Tomentella spp., however, are resupinate or encrusting and so do not form caps, even at the margin of the fruit-body. Tomentella is one of the many genera which were classed collectively as resupinate fungi because they lack a cap and form crusts. This group ‘the resupinates’ consists of a whole series of quite unrelated fungi.
Illustrations: LH 53; NB 478.
Plate 58. Club and Fan-shaped fungi
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(iv) Resupinate fungi
When mycologists talk generally about ‘resupinates’ they are referring to a whole group of Basidiomycetes whose spore-bearing layer is exposed, the cap highly reduced or completely lacking, and the fungus adhering to the surface of the substrate which may be soil, wood, grasses, etc., at the point which would have been the cap of an agaric. Probably members of the group are the most commonly seen yet it is one of the most commonly ignored groups of fungi—by naturalists and mycologists alike; they form ‘white wash’ on old sticks, dark coloured discolourations on trunks, etc. It is an entirely artificial group of many quite unrelated elements united on the common factor of having either a reduced or primitive fruit-body consisting only of a sheet of tissue. However, these same fungi have a uniting factor in that they frequent the same ecological sites, e.g. on muddy soil in bogs, under overhangs of banks and stream sides, undersides of logs, trunks, branches and twigs, hidden in cracks of old stumps or spreading over carpets of conifer needles or dead leaves and sedges.