The Urban Pantheist

Hey look what's growing in one of the potted trees in the greenhouse! This is technically indoors, although things from outdoors much larger than mushroom spores do find their way in. I last saw this species back in November of 2006. In that post I noted that the mushroom had once been lumped in with Coprinus mushrooms--those dung-loving fungi that appear quite suddenly, then disappear almost as suddenly as their gills turn to inky liquid to release the spores.


While this species is shaped similarly to true Coprinus mushrooms, and has a similarly short span of activity, it doesn't deliquesce into liquid, and it doesn't grow from dung or compost. These little caps grow from the bases of trees, emerging from mycelium embedded in the soil and bark: plant and substrate bound together with living threads of fungus.


After releasing spores the incredible thin mushroom flesh withers away. The currently accepted name for this species is Coprinellus disseminatus. Some common names given for it include "crumble cap," "fairy bonnet," and rather tellingly obsolete: "non-inky coprinus."