Alder Bracket

It looks, to be honest, like someone has attacked a dead alder with expanding insulation foam. Which isn’t an especially useful description if you’ve never used insulation foam, but you can trust us on this. Maybe only on this.

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Alder Rollrim

There is no gift shop version of the Alder Rollrim. We've checked. In the dialect of the area we found them - they proper ming. The Rollrim family has a reputation that precedes it, and for excellent reason (we'll get to it in the edibility section).

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Almond Mushroom

Wild Food UK’s description of it as ‘thick and floppy’ is accurate and feels needlessly personal. The flesh is white throughout, firm, and smells of almonds. Cut the stem base: it should remain white or turn very faintly pinkish. Yellow is wrong. Bright, persistent, immediate yellow is very wrong.

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Amethyst Chanterelle

The Amethyst Chanterelle is one of the less-celebrated members of the family (mostly because field guides have historically ignored it, not because it's done anything wrong, though it might have, we can’t say for sure), and is thought to be considerably more widespread than records suggest. Foragers familiar with the common chanterelle have almost certainly walked past one without knowing it.

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Amethyst Deceiver

The Laccaria genus contains a group known collectively as the 'Deceivers' which are named for a tendency to look completely different depending on conditions and age (we feel this in our bones). The Amethyst Deceiver borrowed the family nickname, though when fresh it's probably the least deserving of it.

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Aniseed Funnel

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.

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Artist's Bracket

The Ganoderma genus contains some of the world's most studied medicinal fungi (the glossy, varnished Reishi - Ganoderma lucidum - being the most famous of them). The artist's bracket shares the genus name, but not the shininess. Ganoderma, from the Greek “ganos” (brightness) and “derma” (skin), is a more accurate description of its relatives than of this bracket. It is, to be clear, not shiny. Not even a bit. Well, maybe after it rains a bit? It is mostly a matte brown shelf attached to a tree. The name is doing its best.

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Ascot Hat

It is a mycorrhizal bolete of urban parks and avenues, most often found under lime or poplar trees in the kind of managed green spaces that feel slightly too tidy for anything interesting to be happening in them.

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