A small fungus with a brown cap that dries paler found growing in trooping groups on manured ground and also compost heaps.
Occasional but widespread in parks and gardens. Better known as Panaeolus subbalteatus.
On manured soil, weathered dung, stable waste, decayed leaf litter, decayed hay and straw, and increasingly on decayed woodchip mulch on flowerbeds.
Initially convex then expanded, darkish brown when moist, drying pallid tan or buff from the centre outwards, poorly defined umbo, hygrophanous.
Cap flesh in thin and brown, stem flesh is fragile and brown.
Adnate, crowded, fairly broad, initially pallid tan then mottled barker brown and finally black.
Black spore print.
Slender, silky fibrous, equal, pale towards the apex otherwise concolorous with the cap.
Young basidiomes of Panaeolus cinctulus (= Panaeolus subalteatus) which is typical of old dung piles and also heaps of old grass clippings or straw / hay. The 'belting' [bands of colour] on the cap are just beginning to become evident. Nick Legon Photographs courtesy of Nick Cantle
