Mushrooms in July!

It is not your imagination—this is being posted in 2024. This post for July 2023 and the next, for September 2023, were drafted last year, but languished on my computer following an accident. I am mostly recovered, and finally have the bandwidth to take care of the fun, but nonessential, things in my life. I am dating this according to when the photographs were taken so that the posts land in the right spot in the timeline.  

It seems like an odd time of year to see mushrooms, but we’ve had roughly 1 ½ inches of rain since July 11.  We started the year with a rain deficit, then caught up on rain until May, which was quite dry. June was OK, but July has been unusually wet. 

In the past, we have had the occasional small flush of morels or a fairy ring, and rarely a puffball that’s at least as large as a soccer ball.

This time we have flushes of two obviously different mushrooms. The first is a tiny parasol that is living the pawpaw stump and roots. 

A flush of little parasol mushrooms growing around a pawpaw stump and up the side. The overhanging foliage is Iris cristata, dwarf crested iris. Photographed on July 23, 2023.
A closeup of the translucent parasol mushrooms that are living on the roots of the pawpaw stump. The wrinkled pod to the right of the clump of five mushrooms in the lower left-hand corner is most likely a seedpod that did not set seed from the trillium that were nearby in May. Photographed on July 17, 2023.

My guess about the seedless seedpod in the closeup of the parasol mushrooms is based on the seedpod that did set; I rarely see full seedpods like this. 

Trillium grandiflora with a full seedpod. Photographed on July 17, 2023.

Just a few yards away in the complete shade of the house, there is a smattering of gilled mushrooms that are thriving in last winter’s leaf litter.

Gilled mushrooms, species unknown. The skeletonized maple seed wing gives a rough idea of scale—these are the size of large, but not huge, cultivated mushrooms. Photographed on July 17, 2023.

The caps of this species seem to have a tendency to split as they grow. The mushrooms appeared only in the shade, although the one furthest back in this photograph goes right up to the edge of the sunlight.

A small clump of gilled mushrooms, species unknown, living under the ostrich ferns in deep leaf litter. Photographed on July 17, 2023.

The next round of mushrooms came up in the compost. The pile is warm but not hot. There are two that look extremely similar to me.…

A clump of gilled, small, white mushrooms with tiny white bumps all over their caps. The thready-looking debris on the left and in the middle of the photograph is “smoke” from the smoke bushes, but the seeds are not visible here. Photographed on July 27, 2023.

The other small, white mushroom has a cap that opens a little more, so it ends up a little flatter, bumping up to a round apex in the center. It is also a gilled mushroom with bumps all over, but the gills are very ruffly, to the point of looking pored. 

Another clump of gilled, small, white mushrooms with tiny white bumps all over their caps, but these have caps that open out flatter. They have very ruffled gills. Photographed on July 28, 2023.

I do not know whether these last two represent a single species with a lot of variation, or two different species.

My plan is to enjoy their fungal presence, but leave it at that. They are welcome to help enrich this gravelly soil.

This has been an unusually rainy July; we had nearly 6 inches of rain this month. As if all these fungi were not sufficient evidence, both the lawn and the ferns in the rain garden are looking robustly green for this time of year.

In front, in the rain garden: lady fern; in the middle, redbud; in back on the left, foxglove penstemon, and on the right, nodding onion. Photographed on July 29, 2023.

We shall see what August brings.