Facial cystidia: absent.
Habitat & Distribution: This fungus grows in troops or is found joined at the base to form clusters. It is always attached to old trees, trunks, stumps and buried wood, either directly or by its vegetative stage which darkens and aggregates to form strands resembling boot-laces which are called rhizomorphs.
General Information: This rather variable, and therefore often perplexing, fungus causes a destructive rot of trees and can travel long distances through the soil with the use of its rhizomorphs. It commonly grows on several species of broad-leaved trees, but can also colonise conifer trees. It also attacks garden shrubs, such as privet-hedges, and is particularly destructive to Rhododendrons causing a wilt of the whole shrub and subsequent death; it has also been recorded as attacking potatoes. The actively growing mycelium which can often be found growing under the bark of infected trees, exhibits a luminosity if freshly exposed and placed in a darkened room. The rhizomorphs of A. mellea are highly specialised structures composed of mycelial threads some of which have become rather more differentiated than is normally found in the vegetative stage of other agarics.
Illustrations: F 27a; Hvass 26; LH 93; NB 1411; WD 43.
Pholiota squarrosa (Fries) Kummer Shaggy Pholiota
Cap: width 50-120 mm. Stem: width 17-25 mm; length 95-125 mm.
Description: [Plate 11].
Cap: convex, but expanding and becoming flattened with a slight central umbo, ochre-yellow to yellowish rust-colour and covered with dark brown recurved scales which are particularly dense at the centre.
Stem: variable in length and thickness depending on how it is attached to the substrate, whether in a deep crack or wound, or in a depression, and how many specimens are in the cluster; its colour is similar to that of the cap, exhibits a small, dark brown fibrillose, torn ring or ring-zone and is ornamented with recurved red-brown scales below that ring.
Gills: broadly adnate with a decurrent tooth and crowded, yellowish at first then rust-coloured.