Green brittlegill

Ebernoe Parish, West Sussex, August 2025

On a hot and dry afternoon in late summer 2025 I headed out towards Petworth. The woods around there are well known for their fungal diversity, due to the amount of ancient Low Weald woodland, the number of old trees and lower impact land management. Let’s keep it that way!

It’s surely one of the highest priority areas for conservation in the UK, so much so that I feel bad for even going there!

My first sighting was this little crew of deathcaps! This is an early season mushroom quite a lot of the time. September can be a ‘good’ time to see them.

I’m going in chronological order here. As it was dry I was looking at fallen trees and found these lumpy brackets.

I thought these were oysters at first but they look quite dessicated, and I think they have stipes, unlike oysters.

Another white bracket! These are blushing brackets in my view.

Perhaps the coolest find was this green brittlegill (Russula virescens). It was beautifully neat, a first for me. It’s only later that I noticed the green hue on the cap.

These are probably ochre brittlegills. They were numerous in one patch.

This lovely red brittlegill was on a dried out puddle in the middle of the path.

What a beautiful giant polypore specimen. This is a late August/September species in my experience.

Rooting shank is another common summer mushroom in the Low Weald. I’ve also seen it in oak woodland in London in August. These are phone pics.

My guess here is that these are likely spindleshank. They look quite different when dried out like this, you can also see the white spores on the caps – which shows how little rain there had been. There’s a chance they may be another toughshank.