22.
typical mushroom and a cross section of a
mushroom to show the lack of any gill attach-
ments .
For most people, mushrooms are a product
of open grassy fields. In fact the majority
of species occur in woodland habitats, both
pines and deciduous. In size they range from
one inch midgets to eight or ten inch
goliaths weighing several pounds each.
Although they can be a tricky group to
identify accurately, they can be easily split
into three groups: those whose flesh when
cut turns yellow; those which turn red and
finally those with almost no change - plus a
few exceptions. There are always those I'm
afraid. You may not have thought of mush-
rooms as colourful, and using the Cultivated
Mushroom as a model you would be right as it
is one of the non-colouring ones. Perhaps
that is fortunate for I wonder how many
people would eat mushrooms that turned bright
red? In fact, the colour change in wild
mushrooms bears little relation to their
qualifities as food and the red stainers are
actually delicious. The common Field Mush-
room is a borderline case whose flesh turns
a very pale pinkish or yellowish. (I said
there were exceptions!) The Horse Mushroom,
A. arvensis, is definately a yellowing
species, its cap soon turning brassy yellow.
One of this yellow group incidentally can be
poisonous, which surprises many people who
have always considered mushrooms as safe.
If you pick a mushroom in fields or by hedge-
rows and its skin and particularly its stem
base turn vivid chrome yellow, beware. You
have the Yellow Stainer, a species which
upsets four out of every ten people who eat
it.
Most of the yellowing species are