Mushroom of the Month - June 2009

Wildflowers are at their very best, and the fairies are busy making bonnets from bluebells, harebells and a host of other bell-like flowers. But this must be very tiring work, and at the end of the day the fairies need somewhere to sit down and relax. Dryad's saddle fungi may be a bit on the big side for the average fairy's backside - some of these attractive bracket fungi are more than 50 cm across - but sited conveniently, often quite high up on the trunks of trees, they must provide wonderful vantage points from which a tired dryad can survey the surroundings.

Polyporus squamosus is commonly referred to as Dryad's Saddle. (A dryad is a mythical wood nymph.) This attractive polypore grows in overlapping clusters and tiers on broad-leaved trees. The fruit bodies appear in summer and autumn. Sycamore, willow, poplar and walnut trees are all commonly attacked by this impressively large and attractive fungus, and I have even found it growing on ash trees.

Insects quickly devour these large brackets, and in warm weather they can decay from full splendour to almost nothing in just a few days. The outer edges of young caps are edible and tender, but mature caps have tough flesh - especially near to the stipe.

Individual caps grow to between 10 and 60 cm in diameter and are 5 to 50 mm thick. Often in tiers, the caps are attached to the host tree by a very short lateral (occasionally eccentric but not quite lateral) stipe that darkens towards the base. Beneath the yellow to tan upper surface, the cap flesh is white and tough, and irregularly oval tubes 5 to 10 mm deep terminate in angular pores that are white at first but turn cream as the fruiting body matures. The tubes run decurrently on to the short stem. The spore print is white.

The first dryad's saddles appeared very early this year. I saw one at the end of March and several more in May, but June is the month when they really make their presence known. Although parasitic of trees they are relatively weak parasites, and so trees often survive for many years while bearing these attractive summer brackets.