Scarlet elfcup
I wouldn’t ordinarily write about fungi, not being confident in their identification and certainly wouldn’t comment on foraging them for food until I’ve tried them and lived to tell the tale! But the fungi that I found on my walk looked so interesting that I wanted to talk about them.
The scarlet elfcup, Sarcoscypha austriaca, that I did know the name of (its common name that is, I had no idea about it’s Latin name) it’s such a delight when you stumble across these, as once spotted, they appear so obviously there, but at the same time they are so easily missed. I usually find that they are inaccessible, on the bank the other side of a stream or on a steep slope. My find was on one of our villages' quiet roadside verges at the base of a hedge.
We’re lucky that the scarlet elfcup is fairly common in the UK and also has good distribution. I hope that this continues as it grows on deciduous wood such as hazel, willow and elm but its favoured host is well rotted ash wood. With the loss of ash that we will experience with ash dieback Hymenoscyphus fraxineus we are likely to see a short term increase of the elfcup and then a steady decline, unless that is, new dieback resistant strains replace the old ash that have been lost, but it’s bound to be a bit of a tumultuous time for this fungus and a good example of the knock on effects of an imported harmful plant pathogen. Ash dieback was imported in 2012 from Europe on ash saplings that were infected from Asia where the virus is not lethal and is predicted to kill 80% of native ash trees. But I digress..
The next fungus that was pretty easy to spot, in fact it was hard to miss but has not been so easy to identify.
From what I can find, but stand to be corrected, I think it is something called Stump Flux (who I think may have been the drummer in Scarlet Elfcup’s latest band) that is a mixture of micro fungus, bacteria and yeast in the genus Cryptococcus that accumulates carotene, unsurprisingly, the same pigment found in carrots. Stump flux grows and feeds on the sap of damaged trees and this makes sense as I found it growing on the freshly flayed branch of a sycamore that produces large quantities of sap when cut.
