Description:
Cap: very slimy with colourless sticky fluid, deep bluish green when fresh, but becoming more and more ochraceous-orange with age or completely fading out to a yellow ochre, bell-shaped at first then expanded except for central umbo.
Stem: like the cap very slimy, apple-green or bluish green throughout but becoming ochraceous like the cap except at the apex which is persistently green.
Gills: adnate yellow or apricot-coloured, greenish towards their base, broad, distant and rather tough.
Flesh: whitish, tinged green in the cap and yellow or apricot-colour in the stem.
Spore-print: white.
Spores: medium-sized, hyaline, ellipsoid, not blue-grey in solutions containing iodine and 8-9 × 4-5 µm in size.
Marginal and facial cystidia: absent.
Habitat & Distribution: Common in grassland and hill-pastures, but it also occurs in copses and woodlands.
General Information: This fungus is easily recognised by the distinctive colours, but it is rather deceptive for the cap and the stem soon become faded; however, the green colouration persists at the apex of the stem and it is by this that in the faded state the fungus can still be identified. H. laeta (Fries) Kummer fades to similar colours but the cap is flesh-colour at first or sordid brown and the gills are flesh-coloured or greyish; it prefers upland pastures and heathland: its spores are smaller, being 5-7 × 4 µm.