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Aniseed FunnelClitocybe odora
Kingdom: Fungi
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| Common name | Aniseed Funnel |
| Scientific name | Clitocybe odora |
| AKA | Aniseed Toadstool, Aniseed Mushroom, Blue-Green Clitocybe |
| Season (UK) | Late summer to early winter (generally August to December) |
| Habitat | Deciduous and mixed woodland (in leaf litter under beech, oak and, occasionally, conifer( |
| Cap diameter | 3cm to 8cm |
| Spore print | White to pale pink |
| Edibility | Edible, but best dried and powdered as a flavouring rather than eaten whole |
| Rarity | Occasional but widespread (more common in southern England) |
The Clitocybe genus contains some of the most useful edible fungi in British woodland and also some of the most dangerous, with several species producing muscarine, a toxin that affects the nervous system. A few of them are also genuinely lethal. The Aniseed Funnel is one of the edible ones. Telling the difference mostly comes down to colour and smell, which we’d recommend is not really enough for a beginner (we wouldn’t risk it) but we’ll cover it all in some detail, because it matters.
Overview
Here's a confession that says something about our mycological upbringing (well, one of us at least): until our thirties, we genuinely believed that toadstools were a separate category of thing. Not a mushroom. A toadstool. Something that had evolved specifically to look like a mushroom in order to trick you into eating it and dying. Devious pretend mushrooms. We thought the word 'toadstool' was a warning, not a description. We were wrong. This is one of the entries where we feel we're gaining ground.
The Aniseed Funnel (Clitocybe odora) isn’t going to make the front of a tshirt. While the blue-green of a young, fresh specimen is genuinely quite striking (unusual enough that First Nature describes finding your first one as 'quite a surprise'), the shape is a bit of a mess, the cap goes wavy and irregular pretty quickly and, by the time it's fully mature, it's a sort of greyish lumpy funnel that nobody is putting on a magazine cover. The colour is great, the rest of it is mushroom-shaped in only the loosest sense.
What it lacks in aesthetics, however, it compensates for in smell. The scent of a fresh Aniseed Funnel is one of the most distinctive things in the British woodlands, a powerful, clean, unmistakable blast of aniseed (technically, p-anisaldehyde, if you want to get technical, and why wouldn’t you, which is the same compound responsible for the scent of anise and star anise in your spice drawer) that you can detect before you've even seen the mushroom.
Foragers with experience describe finding it by smell alone. We haven't managed that yet, if we had smelled aniseed in the woods historically, we’d probably have assumed someone dropped a bag of sweets.
In short, this is a mushroom that smells significantly better than it looks, which we can thoroughly relate to.
Identification
The cap is between 3 and 8cm across, and starts convex with an inrolled margin before flattening out as it matures (eventually becoming funnel-shaped, wavy, and irregular at the edges - this is not a mushroom that ages well, aesthetically, another thing we have in common).
The colour in young, fresh specimens is a pale to mid blue-green, almost teal or at least teal adjacent, which is rare enough in British fungi to function as an immediate flag. Older specimens, however, fade quickly to grey-green, then to a rather uninspiring greyish-white, especially in dry weather or direct sunlight. If the colour has gone, the smell is your main method of confirmation.
The gills are crowded, decurrent (meaning they run slightly down the stem), and pale, somewhere between white and faintly blue-green when young, becoming paler and more grey-white with age. The stem is around 3 to 6cm, cylindrical, sometimes curved, fibrous and solid when young but hollowing with age. The base of the stem is typically covered in fine, downy white fibres (a detail worth checking when the cap colour has faded, and the flesh is white throughout with a slight blue-green tinge near the surface.
The smell really is the key to this mushroom, according to the experts, and Pat O'Reilly at First Nature notes that the aniseed funnel is actually more easily detected by its scent than by its appearance, and that it's often buried under brambles and bushes where it can't be seen at all. If you walk through woodland in late summer, and catch a sudden hit of aniseed with no obvious source, feel free to get on your hands and knees and start looking in the undergrowth (you can always claim you’re looking for a contact lens if anyone asks). The mushroom will likely be there somewhere.
The aniseed funnel spore print is white to pale pink, and worth taking for confirmation, particularly if the specimen is old enough that the teal colour has faded and you're working more on smell alone, especially if you’re anosmic, or an alien with no nose.
Blue-green cap, crowded decurrent gills, white downy stem base, unmistakable aniseed smell. Any two of those is probably enough. All four and you've got a confirmed sighting.
Forager's Note: Only collect strongly-scented specimens for eating. If the smell is faint or absent, the mushroom is likely too old or dry to be useful, and a faded, colourless Clitocybe without a strong aniseed scent is considerably harder to distinguish from toxic relatives. Leave pale, scentless specimens alone (we might get a tshirt with this on for personal use).
Lookalikes & ‘Mix-Up’ Species
Forager's Note: The Fragrant Funnel (Clitocybe fragrans) is the one to know. It has a similar aniseed smell but grows in grass rather than woodland, is white to off-white to tan (never blue-green), and contains muscarine. The habitat difference is the clearest single separator. If you're in a field or on a lawn rather than in woodland, it's not an Aniseed Funnel.
The Clitocybe genus contains some genuinely dangerous species. The aniseed funnel's combination of blue-green colour, and powerful aniseed smell is distinctive enough that confident identification is usually straightforward in good specimens, but faded, older specimens are another matter, and a couple of the confusion species are toxic enough to take really seriously.
Fragrant Funnel (Clitocybe fragrans) — similar aniseed smell, similar scale, but white to tan rather than blue-green, and prefers grassy habitats over woodland leaf litter. Contains muscarine, which can cause: sweating, blurred vision, dizziness, nausea, abdominal pain, slow heart rate, a really bad time, and much more besides. Wild Food UK is explicit on this - avoid this confusion. The choice of habitat is your clearest separator.
Ivory Funnel / Fool's Funnel (Clitocybe dealbata / rivulosa) — white, no aniseed smell, mealy rather than fragrant. Found in grassland, fairy ring-forming. Poisonous! Not really a lookalike for a fresh blue-green specimen, but once the aniseed funnel has faded completely, the shape similarity is enough to cause hesitation. This is one of the reasons to only collect strongly-scented specimens.
Verdigris Roundhead (Stropharia aeruginosa) — also blue-green, and young specimens can catch the eye in the same way. But stropharia aeruginosa has a slimy, sticky cap covered in white scales near the margin, a ring on the stem, and absolutely no aniseed smell. It also has a dark spore print. It’s not a close lookalike on inspection, but worth knowing if only because 'another blue-green mushroom' is enough to make a distracted forager pause.
Clitocybe odora var. Alba - a white variety of the aniseed funnel that lacks the blue-green colouration entirely, but retains the strong scent. It's uncommon, and if you find something white and funnel-shaped that smells powerfully of aniseed in a beech wood, it might be this. Or it might be Clitocybe fragrans in the wrong place. Smell carefully and check the habitat and spore print.
Edibility
Edible, and actually pretty useful in the kitchen. The catch is that 'useful' and 'delicious eaten whole' are not quite the same thing here.
The flavour is powerful, clean, and very specifically aniseed, which is either exactly what you want or the thing you've been avoiding since a bad experience with sambuca in 2003. If, however, you like fennel, anise, star anise, or anything in that flavour family, the aniseed funnel is genuinely a great ingredient.
The recommended approach across most sources (Wild Food UK, First Nature, Discover the Wild) — is to dry and powder the mushroom and use it as a spice or condiment rather than eating it whole. Dried aniseed funnel retains its flavour and can be added in small quantities to soups, risottos, cream sauces, or anything where you'd reach for fennel seed. It's particularly noted as a flavouring for white fish dishes (plaice, cod, that sort of thing), where the aniseed note works the same way a classic sauce vierge does. A small amount goes a long way.
One practical note worth repeating from experts: roadside specimens should be avoided, as Clitocybe odora grows in habitats that often border roads and the species bioaccumulates heavy metals, which can make them extremely toxic. Woodland finds, well away from traffic, are fine. Motorway embankments are not a foraging destination - good advice in general as much as for this shroom in particular.
Naming history
The aniseed funnel was first formally described in 1784 by Jean Baptiste François Pierre Bulliard, who was more than just a man with a lot of names. A French mycologist, botanist, and prolific illustrator, whose multi-volume Herbier de la France (published between 1780 and 1793) is considered one of the finest works of botanical illustration of the 18th century (which, honestly, could be an insult or a compliment, we’re not sure), Bulliard named it Agaricus odorus (fragrant agaric) which, given the smell, was pretty much the most obvious name available. He took it. Can't blame him. Sometimes you have stuff on.
The species sat in the Agaricus holding pen for nearly a century before German mycologist Paul Kummer reclassified it as a Clitocybe in 1871, giving it the binomial Clitocybe odora that still stands. Kummer was remarkably productive that year, his 1871 publication Der Führer in die Pilzkunde ('Guide to Mycology' or, literally, ‘The Guide to Mushroom Science’, thanks Duo) established or formalised the placement of dozens of species, and Paul Kummer remains the authority abbreviation behind a significant proportion of the Clitocybe genus. Sometimes you have nothing on.
The genus name Clitocybe comes from the Greek klitos, meaning 'slope', and kybe, meaning 'head' (so, approximately, 'sloping head'), which describes the funnel-shaped cap that many species in the genus develop at maturity. Usually pronounced 'klite-oss-a-bee', we will continue to read it as ‘klit-oss-ibe’ and there’s nothing you can do about it.
The species name odora simply means 'perfumed' or 'fragrant' in Latin and it’s stood for 240 years, still describing the most obvious thing about it. Some names stick. Unless you move schools, and far enough away, and never speak of it again.
The British Mycological Society's official common name list calls it the Aniseed Funnel, though older field guides often use Aniseed Toadstool or Aniseed Funnelcap. The Welsh name, for anyone keeping score, is Twmffat Anis (funnel annis), which we are delighted by and cannot dream of pronouncing.
Ecology
The aniseed funnel is saprotrophic, meaning it feeds on decaying organic matter rather than forming partnerships with living tree roots. This makes it somewhat less picky about location than mycorrhizal species, and more dependent on the quality of the leaf litter and humus layer than the specific trees above it. Beech woodland is the most frequently cited habitat in UK sources, but it turns up under oak, mixed deciduous woodland, and occasionally under conifers.
It often grows close to, or under, brambles and dense low undergrowth, which, combined with its habit of being smelled before seen, makes it one of the more memorable finds for exactly the wrong reason. You're following a scent, then you're on your hands and knees in a bramble patch, then you have it, and a handful of thorns. There's a school of thought that this is part of the appeal of foraging, we remain unconvinced - we’ve ended up in patches of brambles in far worse ways, however.
Research published in 2002 by Rapior and colleagues identified p-anisaldehyde as the primary compound responsible for the Aniseed Funnel's distinctive scent (the same molecule found in anise, star anise, and fennel). The compound is volatile enough to diffuse significantly through leaf litter and low-growing vegetation, which explains why the smell precedes the visual find so reliably. There's also a small amount of benzaldehyde (the primary compound in bitter almond aroma) present, though the aniseed note completely dominates in fresh specimens.
Separately (and interestingly, though not directly relevant to anything, again, you can’t stop us) p-anisaldehyde is also used in the fragrance industry as a component in perfumes and floral scent compositions. So, technically, the aniseed funnel smells like a mushroom and also, faintly, like a department store. We weren’t sure what to do with this information. It's yours now.
Where to Find It in the UK
We haven't found one yet. This is embarrassing to admit given how distinctive the smell is supposed to be, but we’re the first to admit we’re foraging novices. The smell, apparently, stops you in your tracks. We're still waiting to be stopped.
Wild Food UK rates it as 'occasional but widespread' across the UK, with Discover the Wild noting it's more common in the south of England than further north. Beech woodland on chalk and limestone (the Chilterns, the North and South Downs, the Cotswolds escarpment etc.). The New Forest is reliably productive for late summer woodland fungi in general, and the aniseed funnel is no exception. Epping Forest in Essex also gets regular records.
Further north, it becomes patchier, with occasional finds in the East Midlands and Yorkshire, and even fewer recorded in the north of England and Scotland, though whether this reflects genuine scarcity or under-recording in habitats that are less intensively foraged is unclear. Mixed oak woodlands in Wales (the Wye Valley particularly) produce records, and the species has been found in Ireland, though again the distribution map probably understates the reality.
The aniseed funnel season runs August to December, with September and October being the most productive. Look in deep leaf litter, under mature beech, particularly in hollows or sheltered spots where leaf fall accumulates. Check under brambles. Follow your nose. If you catch aniseed and there are no food vendors or early 20th Century school children nearby, get on the ground.
Worth knowing
The Aniseed Funnel has been used in foraging education for centuries as a 'scent trail' species used to introduce beginners to the hobby because its smell is so unmistakable that it teaches the lesson that identification isn't only visual. Smell is data.
The white variety, Clitocybe odora var. alba, has all the same characteristics except the blue-green colouration. Same smell, same habitat, same season, same edibility, but is rare in the UK, and finding one would be genuinely notable. Something to keep in mind if you encounter a white funnel-shaped mushroom in a beech wood that smells powerfully of aniseed and stubbornly refuses to be anything else.
We still think the tshirt question is open. The blue-green of a really fresh specimen (proper teal, almost luminous in the right light) is the kind of colour that works on dark fabric and looks like it was designed rather than found. Whether the overall shape is compelling enough to build around is the problem. It's a funnel. A nice-smelling, unusually coloured funnel. We're thinking about it.
Sources: Wild Food UK, The Wildlife Trusts, Wikipedia (Clitocybe odora), First Nature, Discover the Wild, Rapior et al. (2002), Flavour & Fragrance Journal
This article is for informational purposes only. Never consume any wild mushroom without a confirmed identification from a qualified expert. Several Clitocybe species are seriously toxic. Mushroom Future cannot be held responsible for foraging decisions made on the basis of this or any other written guide. Including the bit about following your nose. Especially that bit, actually.