The grassland toadstool season started early this year. These inkcaps weren’t here last week and they’ll soon vanish, leaving just a dark stain on the lawn. I think they must be the glistening inkcap but it’s hard to be certain. Heavy rain has washed away the diagnostic powdery scales that normally cover the cap. Earlier torrential downpours softened the earth, hard-baked by early summer drought, allowing these smooth, conical caps to shoulder it aside on their way to the surface. Now they are ragged around their rim, a sign of impending deliquescence into inky, spore-laden goo that will stick to flies’ feet, to be carried away to pastures new.
Every year, I struggle to refresh my identification skills for tricky brown grassland toadstools, without ever acquiring enough confidence for a fungal foray with a meal in mind; sitting on the edge of uncertainty isn’t conducive to comfortable eating. Scientific advances based on DNA analysis, renaming and reordering species have not helped, rendering some of my old field guides obsolete. They’ve renamed this one, learned in my youth as Coprinus, meaning “of dung”, as a Coprinellus. A misnomer either way: it doesn’t digest dung. This troop of toadstools is probably growing on decayed tree roots under the neatly mown grass.
Where the footpath crosses a field I almost step in a crusty old cowpat that’s hosting a genuine dung-lover, the egghead mottlegill, Panaeolus semiovatus. It’s probably the last in a series of fungi that began colonising this ordure when it first plopped on to the pasture, and it’s about to shed spores on to surrounding grass where they’ll be eaten by the cows. They cycle unharmed through the ruminant’s gut, emerging into a fertile pool of fresh cow faeces. This mottlegill is considered inedible but, bearing in mind its proclivities, who would be tempted anyway?
On my way home I pass the glistening inkcaps again and pick a few. The field guide says that they’re edible, although related species eaten with alcohol can cause violent illness. Uncertainty prevails, but food is not what I have in mind anyway. In 1784, a French mycologist, Jean Baptiste Buillard, first suggested making drawing ink from inkcaps, and I’ve found a recipe. Curiosity beckons.
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