21.
different meanings in different places.
The white cap and stem of the Cultivated
Field and Horse Mushrooms are well known
features. What exactly makes a mushroom
a mushroom and not one of the many hundred
of other toadstools found in this Country?
The white cap and stem are not actually
important features at all, in fact many
mushrooms are brown and scaly, or yellow or
grey or even purple! The important charac-
ters are the floppy ring around the top of
the stem and the gills (the thin plates
radiating outwards underneath the cap) which
start life as pale to deep pink and then
soon turn greyish and finally deep brown.
These gills are also "free". This means
that they reach the stem but do not join on
to it. An Agaricus must have these features
and no others. Figures 1 & 2 show firstly a