Quote:
Originally Posted by pressld2  I'm not very familiar with Clumber Park but it was in a mossy area close to the lakeside and, using the map that John sent beforehand, I would say it was in the Lady Garden area.
There was quite a lot of microscope work done on it on Saturday night which I think is where the marchii came from.
Dave P. |
Unfortunately the microscopy was inconclusive because we didn't have a copy of Boertmann's book to hand and we only looked at the spores.
I did some further work on the waxcaps from that area on Monday, by which stage my specimens were fairly putrid. However, the cap cuticle seemed to me to be dry and squamulose, which would rule out both
H. coccinea and
H. marchii (- technically the cuticle was a dry trichoderm). The gill trama was subregular with relatively short elements.
Keying this out takes you to the part of the key with
H. miniata in it, but the spores were the wrong shape, being oblong or broadly ellipsoid rather than triangular. Following the key I arrived at
H. calciphila, which has spores of the right shape and size and seems a good possibility... apart from the fact that it is restricted to calcareous soils. So was this a very small and unusual patch of calcareous grassland?
I think the identification needs further work on fresher specimens than I had. But
H. coccinea was definitely ruled out by the spore size, and
H. marchii seems unlikely because this species should have a greasy to lubricous cap cuticle (the cap cuticle on my specimens showed no sign of being an ixocutis or ixotrichoderm) and it has a higher average Q value for the spores.