Panthers in the garden?

I am seeing fungi popping up in the garden a bit earlier than I expected - maybe something to do with the wet July?

An unusual purple one popped up in my raised beds.  The beds are a new addition to the garden this year and have loads of compost (from my compost heaps) which might explain the new fungi.

 

I have recently bought a microscope and I am having a lot of fun looking at lichens and their spores (that will be another post!) so I thought I would try and see the spores from this fungus.  To get  spore print, you just put the cap, gill side down on a piece of paper and leave it for a few hours. I put a microscope slide there as well. The photo shows a different fungus but you get the idea.

Getting a spore print (from another mushroom)

The results were a bit underwhelming!  The spores are very small and round and that's about all I could make out. They really all very small - about 7 um (micrometres) long,  That's 7 millionths of a metre or 7 thousandths of a millimetre. So about 140 would fit in a millimetre if lined up end to end.

Mushroom spores

I tried to ID it and thought it might be Lepista sordida, but I got some help from an expert friend (thank you ,Liz) and it is Wood Blewit (Lepista nuda). There were some older specimens which had lost their purple colour on the cap but were still purple underneath (though not that obvious in the second photo).

A more regular visitor is this one which pops up in the lawn each year, probably growing on birch roots. 

It starts off as a round bump in the grass and then pushes up to the more usual mushroom shape with a circular pattern of beige  flecks.

The flecks are the remnants of  the bag or veil that enclosed the growing mushroom and which breaks as it grow up, leaving the flecks on the top and a collar around the stem.

There is a bulbous base to the stalk and the gills are white

I thought it was Panther Cap (Amanita pantherina).  So did I have panthers on the lawn? I'm afraid not - I was wrong again! It is The Blusher (Amanita rubescens), so called because the flesh turns redder when bruised.  I did try this test but hadn't realised that the colour change is quite gradual so I was too hasty in assuming it did not change.  It all goes to show that a little knowledge is not enough when identifying fungi.