Deadly Galerina
The deadly galerina is a small, unremarkable brown mushroom that grows in tufts on rotting wood — a rusty-brown to tan bell-shaped cap that fades as it dries, brownish gills, and a slender stem with a thin ring and a pale mealy zone above it. It fruits on logs, stumps, and buried wood, especially in autumn, and produces a rusty-brown spore print. Nothing about its plain appearance warns of its danger.
It contains the same amatoxins as the death cap and has caused fatal poisonings among people who mistook it for small edible wood-growing mushrooms. Its serious lookalikes all share the wood-cluster habit: honey fungus, enoki, and the sheathed woodtuft. This is the strongest possible argument against eating any small brown mushroom clustered on wood — a rusty-brown spore print and wood-growing tufts should stop identification cold. Ecologically it is simply a decomposer of dead conifer and hardwood.
Deadly
Deadly — contains the same amatoxins as the death cap and causes fatal liver failure; cooking does not destroy the toxin. Mistaken for small edible wood-growing mushrooms. Its warning combination is a small rusty-brown cap in tufts on wood, a thin stem ring, and a rusty-brown spore print — a reason never to eat any small brown mushroom clustered on a log.
Honey fungus (Armillaria mellea), Enoki (Flammulina velutipes), Sheathed woodtuft (Kuehneromyces mutabilis)
Decomposes dead conifer and hardwood, recycling woody debris to soil. Ecologically ordinary, but one of the deadliest mushrooms in the garden if eaten.
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