Plutaceae     Family

This is a key to gilled mushrooms, that is, mushrooms having a definite cap with a fertile surface consisting of gills. The fruiting body usually also has a stem, although that may be lateral or absent (usually, then, the mushroom is growing from wood). You can use this key to identify mushrooms that you find.

Fruiting body containing fibers (usually in the stalk)

Spores pink or reddish

Diagnosis

• Gills free
  
• Often growing on wood

• Stalk fitting into cap with a ball-and-socket attachment, cleanly separable along this join
  
• Except when very young, flesh usually flabby, soft, very putrescible

Microscropic Characters

• Gill trama convergent
  
• Spores smooth, lacking an apical pore

Comments

Narrow down your identification:

• Lacking a volva
  
• Growing on wood or woody debris
  
• Typically bluntly conical or campanulate when young, becoming umbonate (often a flat cap with a very small umbo) in age
  
• Often somewhat scaly or fibrillose on the disk

• With a saccate volva, or cup, at the base of the stalk
  
• On a variety of substrates
  
• Cap typically (but not in this picture) bluntly conical, not umbonate or convex

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