Golden Bootleg, Phaeolepiota aurea, in Wymondham Cemetery. 23rd November 2023.

On a bike ride in late November 2023 I stopped off in Wymondham Cemetery and ate lunch, sitting on a bench under pines at the top of the hill overlooking the railway.

I was about to leave when I glanced across at an area of quite recent graves and struck gold: four chunky fruitbodies of Phaeolepiota aurea clustered together in the grass (note 1).

Golden in colour

Phaeolepiota aurea has large, golden fruitbodies, with a cap diameter up to 20 or even 30 centimetres (seven to 12 inches). The fungus’ specific name aurea means ‘golden’ and alternative English names, used in the United States, also refer to the colour: Golden Cap, Gold Cup, Alaskan Gold and Golden False Pholiota. There are also references to gold in other languages. It is a very fleshy fungus with a completely dry surface texture.

What about the Bootleg?

When young, Phaeolepiota aurea is covered by a grainy sheath, which also gives it a pale hue, more golden than orange. The sheath soon tears at the cap rim to form a substantial pendant ring or skirt. It resembles a leg in a boot, hence the fungus’ English name.

The genus name Phaelepiota comes from phae-, meaning “dusky” and lepis, meaning scales, although the cap is covered in tiny granules rather than flaky scales.

Golden Bootleg Lookalikes

“Most likely to be confused with the Spectacular Rustgill Gymnopilus junonius” – Nature Spot website.

Being big and bright golden to orange, Phaeolepiota aurea is sometimes confused with another big, bold and similarly coloured fungus, the Spectacular Rustgill (Gymnopilus junonius).

This dramatic fungus has equally large fruitbodies and a stem ring but the “bootleg” is only found in Phaeolepiota aurea. Spectacular Rustgill fruitbodies are always attached to wood (sometimes buried, so this is not immediately obvious) while the Golden Bootleg grows directly on the soil.

Spectacular Rustgills, Gymnopilus junonius, growing on a dead pine stump. Holkham, North Norfolk, 4th October 2020.

The First Nature website has some great photos of Golden Bootleg and Spectacular Rustgill at different stages of growth, for a full comparison.

The American name “Golden False Pholiota” refers to the slight similarlity to Scalycap fungi (genus Pholiota) but, like Spectacular Rustgill, these grow on wood. They are a brighter orange or orange-yellow, covered in coarse scales (at least when young) and lack the sheath and “bootleg”.

Mistaken Identity

“A little learning is a dangerous thing” – Alexander Pope (1688-1744).

I thought I’d seen my first Golden Bootlegs at Wymondham but I was wrong.

I like to think that I’m now experienced enough to be able to distinguish Golden Bootleg from Spectacular Rustgill (which I’ve seen several times). But as I looked back at my photographs of the “Spectacular Rustgills” I had seen at Sheringham Park in North Norfolk in October 2019 I realised I had made a big mistake. What i’d assumed were Spectacular Rustgills growing on buried wood were in fact Golden Bootlegs.

Fortunately Tony Moverley from the Norfolk Fungus Study Group saw the fungi on exactly the same day and correctly recorded them as Phaeolepiota aurea.

That day Vanna and I were fortunate to see at least thirty fruitbodies, including younger ones still wrapped in a sheath. It was a wonderful sight, even if we didn’t know exactly what we’d seen.

Some of the Golden Bootlegs at Sheringham Park, 2nd October 2019.

A young Golden Bootleg. Sheringham Park, 2nd October 2019.

Phaeolepiota aurea still wrapped in its sheath. Sheringham Park, 2nd October 2019. Photo by Vanna Bartlett.

Phaeolepiota aurea – Spectacular and Odd

“This has to be the drama queen of mushrooms” – Wild Food UK website.

Phaeolepiota aurea is featured in the latest edition of “Field Mycology” (Vol 25 (1), February 2024, British Mycological Society) in Alick Henrici’s “Notes and Records” (note 2).

Over a hundred Golden Bootleg fruitbodies appeared in Kew Gardens in mid November 2023 “during a dry period when few agarics of any size were to be seen”, similar in weather conditions and timing to my finds at Wymondham.

Golden Bootlegs had only been recorded once before at Kew, in 2009. It seems that the fungus can exist as a massive mycelium underground, producing fruitbodies at certain times, sometimes trooping in very large numbers. I saw four at Wymondham and 30 at Sheringham Park but in Volume 1 of Laessoe and Petersen’s two volume “Fungi of Temperate Europe” (page 315) there is a photograph of a spectacular fairy ring of Phaeolepiota aurea, which Alick Henrici estimates may contain over 500 fruitbodies – a mind boggling  quantity of Golden Bootlegs!

Phaeolepiota aurea is saprobic, feeding on rich organic matter in the soil. Sometimes the fungus can be found in patches of Stinging Nettles (Urtica dioica) – nettles like places with high levels of nutrients – but the Kew sightings were under Rhododendrons (in 2009) and “some unremarkable grassland” (2023).

Up to the end of 2022, Norfolk had 24 records from 13 different sites, with Golden Bootlegs seen from September to November. A single site at Lynford Arboretum was in a bed of Stinging Nettles (five records) and four more of the records were in grass. Laessoe and Petersen give the habitat as “rich, often disturbed soils, e.g. in fertilized lawns or stands of nettles”.

Cemeteries can have rich and disturbed soils (for obvious reasons) and the part of the cemetery where the Golden Bootlegs were growing had quite recent graves and had produced a massive crop of Shaggy Inkcaps in October 2020.

Shaggy Inkcaps, Coprinus comatus (17th October 2020), growing in the same area of Wymondham Cemetery as November 2023’s Phaeolepiota aurea.

The Sheringham Park site was in a big clearing on the edge of the woods. The grass was very lush and was presumably growing over enriched soil.

But there are plenty of places with enriched soil and most of them don’t have Golden Bootlegs.

Look But Don’t Eat

“All fungi are edible. Some fungi are only edible once.” – Terry Pratchett.

A single Golden Bootleg would make a substantial meal and the fungus looks and smells appetising. The taste is described as “mild and sweet” and the fungus has an enticing, pleasant smell of almonds. Phaeolepiota aurea is sometimes collected for food in Russia and China.

However, the Golden Bootleg is known to cause gastrointestinal disturbance in some individuals. Its almond smell comes from hydrocyanic acid and it can accumulate cadmium from its surroundings (note 3).

The most compelling reason not to eat Golden Bootleg is its comparative rarity in Britain (note 4) and it is best to leave the fruitbodies in situ for others to appreciate (note 5).

A Taxonomic Oddball

“This oddball mushroom has confounded mycologists down the ages as they struggled to fit it in to existing genera” – First Nature website.

Phaeolepiota aurea is the only member of its genus.

Phaeolepiota is in the family Agaricaceae, along with many familiar species, such as Field Mushroom (Agaricus campestris), Giant Puffball (Calvatia gigantea) and Shaggy Inkcap (Coprinus comatus). Its closest relatives are the powdercaps (Cystoderma).

The Earthy Powdercap (Cystoderma amianthinum) looks a little like a miniature Golden Bootleg. It grows in grass and has a finely granular, pale ochraceous yellow to reddish brown cap. The top of its stem is granular but it is scaly further down the stem. Its cap is no more than five centimetres (two inches) across, so there is no chance of confusion.

I’ve seen it in Wymondham Cemetery on a couple of occasions, but none were fruiting on the day I saw the Golden Bootlegs.

Notes

Note 1 – I also found a few things under the pine trees including Crab Brittlegill (Russula xerampelina) and Grey Knight (Tricholoma terreum).

Note 2 – The sub-heading in the article is “Phaeolepiota aurea – spectacular and odd”. I liked it, so have stolen it for one of my sub-headings.

Note 3 – Peter Marren (in “Mushrooms”, British Wildlife Publishing 2012) notes that other fungi contain small amounts of hydrocyanic acid, including the edible Fairy Ring Champignon (Marasmius oreades). Cooking makes these safe to eat. Apparently Phaeolepiota aurea contains larger quantities, but I haven’t found any comparative figures. At least some of the hydrocyanic acid in Phaeolepiota aurea should be destroyed by cooking.

Many plants also contain cyanide compounds, usually cyanogenic glycosides (where cyanides are bound to sugar molecules). These glycosides are broken down in the gut to produce hydrogen cyanide. This is not usually a problem if they are eaten in small quantities (such as the occasional Apple pip swallowed by accident) or if cooked.

For the effects of cooking foods containing cyanogenic glycosides, the report “Natural Toxins in Food Plants“by Hong Kong’s Centre For Food Safety is worth a read.

No amount of cooking will remove cadmium, although to be fair, crops such as rice and cocoa can also accumulate cadmium and I’m not going to stop eating them. If you want to know more, parts of “Cadmium in soils and groundwater: A review” (Kubier A., Wilkin, R. T. and Pichler, T., Applied Geochemistry, Vol. 108, 2019) are available online. Levels of cadmium in soils depend on natural factors such as geology, but human activities such as mining can cause raised levels and cadmium is also found as an impurity in phosphate fertilisers.

Note 4 – Phaeolepiota aurea no longer appears as a rare and probably threatened species on the British Red Data List of Threatened Fungi but it is not common. In the latest edition of “Field Mycology” (Vol 25 (1), February 2024, British Mycological Society) Alick Henrici describes how many members of the BMS on the Autumn Foray in 2003 had their first sighting of the fungus at Gresham’s School in Holt, North Norfolk.

There are currently 150 records for Great Britain and Northern Ireland on the NBN Atlas. Outside the British Isles, Phaeolepiota aurea is found throughout Eurasia and North America. In North America it is “widely distributed” and “not of concern”.

Note 5 – By “others” I include mites, springtails and molluscs, which use fungal fruitbodies for shelter or food. I collect single specimens of fungi that I need to examine microscopically but this time I had identified Phaeolepiota aurea with certainty and, however enticing it looked, had no need to remove it.