Mushroom of the Month - January

Sarcoscypha coccinea is January's fungal gem, although this is a mushrom that you will find right through to springtime. Commonly referred to as scarlet elf cup fungus, this Ascomycetes fungus appears throughout the winter on half-buried dead wood (usually hardwood such as hazel, willow and alder) in damp, shady places. Its bright red cup interiors stand out against the green moss that invariably covers the decaying fallen twigs from which the caps emerge. The irregularly shaped caps, which are edible when cooked, are usually 2 or 3 cm in diameter but can be as large as 5 cm and have a smooth, scarlet inner hymenal surface and a much paler felty outer surface. The edges of young cups are usually incurved. There is a very short stipe, often buried in leaf litter, and it is the same colour as the outer surface of the cup.

We find these lovely fungi, often in vast numbers, in shallow ditches beneath hedges, on fallen logs lying across well-shaded wooded streams, and in dark quarries - wherever hardwood twigs lie in damp, shady places and the moss that soon covers them does not dry out. Often it seems as though the cups are simply growing from soil, but they never are: if you dig down a couple of cm you will always find that their short pale stems are attached to rotten wood.

Despite the bright red colour of the fruitbodies, spores from the caps of this fungus are white.

The only common species likely to be confused with scarlet elf cup is Aleuria aurantia, the orange peel fungus, whose caps are usually rather larger and are orange rather than red. Orange peel fungus grows on soil rather than on wod and is appears in summer and autumn.