I’d like to introduce you to the Warted Amanita, Amanita strobiliformis. It’s a big, chunky and distinctive mushroom, often found quite early in the fungus season.

Warted Amanita, Amanita strobiliformis. Norwich, 11th August 2025.

The cap of Amanita strobiliformis is white to greyish cream in colour and up to 25 centimetres (nearly 10 inches) across, carried on a chunky stem 10 – 15 centimetres (four to six inches) above the ground. The stem continues to nearly the same depth underground and has a stout, rooting base, described as napiform (shaped like a turnip root). There are usually thick polygonal plaques of greyish-white veil on the cap, which resemble warts and give the fungus its English name of Warted Amanita.

The gills are crowded and white in colour. Younger specimens have lovely veil flakes on the edge of the cap and a white, soft stem ring with the texture of soft cream cheese, but this disappears from older fruitbodies.

Warted Amanita, Amanita strobiliformis. A lovely young specimen with stem ring. Norwich, 11th August 2025.

The flesh has an unusual smell when cut or bruised, described as “old ham or chloride of lime” (note 1), although the First Nature website says “cut radishes“.

Smells can be very subjective and rather subtle. The Italian Associazione Micologica E Botanica (AMINT) website says that the fungus is “priva di odore e sapore significativo” (devoid of significant odour and flavour).

Finding Amanita strobiliformis

“This is a mushroom that can be spotted from a hundred metres away.” (Wild Food UK website).

My wife Vanna found our first Warted Amanita in our local cemetery in October 2023 and she took me to see it. It was quite a beast:

Measured for height. Warted Amanita, Amanita strobiliformis. Earlham Cemetery, Norwich, 11th October 2023.

Width of cap. Warted Amanita, Amanita strobiliformis. Earlham Cemetery, Norwich, 11th October 2023.

Picked specimen. Warted Amanita, Amanita strobiliformis. Earlham Cemetery, Norwich, 11th October 2023.

The following September we found a couple of fruitbodies under a Common Lime tree (Tilia x europaea) when cycling near Litcham in west Norfolk and in August 2025 we were walking by the ring road in Norwich when we found the beautiful young specimen in the first two photographs on this blog.

We would normally have left the specimen by the ring road in situ for others to see. However, men with mowers were busy cutting the verges that day. They were not far up the road and the sound of mowers was getting ominously closer. I knew the fruitbody would be mashed up within the next hour, so I decided to pick it (note 2).

In the last couple of years we’ve also found fruitbodies of Amanita strobiliformis on roadsides in the Norfolk Brecks, while cycling through Beech woodland. They were an impressive sight.

“Warts and all“. A Warted Amanita, Amanita strobiliformis growing by a roadside in Beech woodland in the Norfolk Brecks (13th September 2025)

The generic name strobiliformis means “shaped like a pine cone” and refers to the shape of the stem. An alternative English name is “European Pine Cone Lepidella”. (The genus Amanita is subdivided into sections and Amanita strobiliformis is in Section Lepidella.)

The genus Amanita is probably from the Ancient Greek name for a mountain (“Mount Amanus”) in Cilicia (in modern day Turkey) or the ancient city of Amantia (in modern day Albania).

The genus Amanita contains about 600 species worldwide, including some very well known fungi: the psychoactive Fly Agaric (Amanita muscaria), the deadly Deathcap (Amanita phalloides) and the edible and highly esteemed Caesar’s Mushroom (Amanita caesarea). While the first two are common British species, the latter is found in southern Europe and North Africa.

The family is the Amanitaceae (which contains some other smaller genera as well as Amanita) and these fungi are Basidiomycetes (members of the division Basidiomycota),. They produce spores on club-shaped microscopic structures known as basidia.

Distribution of Amanita strobiliformis

FungiAtlas.com says that Amanita strobiliformis is “scattered and local in southern and central Europe, parts of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia” and the First Nature website says it is “known in Europe from the Mediterranean as far north as Britain and the Netherlands“. It certainly grows in Italy and there are some lovely photos of Italian specimens on the Associazione Micologica E Botanica (AMINT) website.

In the British Isles, the Warted Amanita is found most frequently in southern England, often in open grasslands and parklands.

I’ve mostly seen it on road verges but our first specimen was in grass near a pine tree, in Earlham Cemetery in Norwich. There are a couple of records from Ireland and more from Scotland and 31 records from 18 sites in Norfolk up to the end of 2025. (Vanna and I have added some more records and one new site this year.)

According to FungiAtlas.com Amanita strobiliformis is “mycorrhizal with deciduous trees, especially oak, beech, and linden” [limes, Tilia] and Wikipedia and the First Nature website say that Amanita strobiliformis is “mycorrhizal with deciduous trees”. However, in his 2016 guide “The Genus Amanita in Britain” Geoffrey Kibby says that it is “probably not mycorrhizal with trees” (note 1).

I’ve seen Amanita strobiliformis growing near Common Lime (Tilia x europaea), Beech (Fagus sylvatica) and a species of pine (Pinus). The majority of its associations on the Fungal Records Database of Britain and Ireland (FRBDI) are with Beech.

There is general agreement that Amanita strobiliformis prefers calcareous (limestone-rich) soils and is usually found in light deciduous forests, on forest edges and in parks and open woodland.

Amanita strobiliformis can be found as early as July or August, but records peak in September and it can fruit into October or even November.

Distribution map for Warted Amanita, Amanita strobiliformis from The British Mycological Society Fungal Records Database of Britain and Ireland. [Accessed on 27th September 2026]

Edibility

The consensus is that Amanita strobiliformis is not worth eating. The Wild Food UK and First Nature websites are rightly cautious about edibility because of Warted Amanita’s very toxic relatives, such as Deathcap (Amanita phalloides) and Destroying Angel (Amanita virosa) (note 3).

There are also suggestions “that it may contain ibotenic acid or muscimol, in which case it is likely to be hallucinogenic if eaten, causing symptoms similar to those resulting from eating the Fly Agaric (Amanita muscaria)“. This is either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your point of view.

According to FungiAtlas.com “Some regional sources describe Amanita strobiliformis as conditionally edible after prolonged boiling in multiple changes of water“. The Associazione Micologica E Botanica (AMINT) website says it is “certamente un fungo privo d’interesse alimentare” (certainly a mushroom of no nutritional interest).

I’m not tempted to try it.

How the Amanita got its spots

The warts on the cap of Amanita strobiliformis are of similar origin to the white spots on the cap of the Fly Agaric, Amanita muscaria.

A Fly Agaric, Amanita muscaria. Syderstone Common, Norfolk, 4th November 2022.

The immature Warted Amanita fruitbody is fully enclosed and protected by a membranous envelope known as the universal veil. It’s “sort of like a soft eggshell – it can be peeled away without damaging the embryonic mushroom inside. When the mushroom’s stalk starts to expand, it breaks out of the universal veil and keeps on going.”

When the universal veil is split apart, remnants are often left behind.

At the base of the stipe (stem) of the Fly Agaric the remains of the universal veil form an obvious cup-like structure, known as the volva. In Amanita strobiliformis this is less well defined and present as scales of volval tissue at the base of the stem.

The other remains of the universal veil are the white spots on the cap of the Fly Agaric and the greyish-white warts on the cap of Amanita strobiliformis.

Both Amanita strobiliformis and the Fly Agaric also have a ring on the stipe. This is the remains of another veil, known as the partial or inner veil, which protects the gills of the immature fruitbody. As the cap expands the veil splits open and the ring can remain on the stem, either whole or in small fragments, or it can disappear altogether.

If you’d like to know more I recommend reading a fascinating article about the universal veil and a useful glossary about the partial or inner veil, both on the website of Mushroom: The Journal of Wild Mushrooming.

A picture may help too:

A fungal fruitbody A) the early development stage, and (B) after the body is fully expanded. Copyright SnowFire (CC BY 4.0). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_veil#/media/File:Basidioma_agaric_veils.png)

The diagram shows a fungal fruitbody in A) the early development stage, and (B) after it is fully expanded.

The universal veil (1) protects the immature fruitbody. As the fruitbody expands it leaves behind a volva at the base of the stipe (4) and veil remnants on the cap (3).

The partial or inner veil (2) protects the gills in the immature fruitbody and is left behind as the annulus (stem ring) (5).

In some fungi, such as webcaps, genus Cortinarius, the inner veil forms a web-like cortina (see note 4).

Bioaccumulation

Some fungi bioaccumulate certain chemical elements from soil. For example, the Golden Bootleg, Phaeolepiota aurea (which I wrote about in March 2024) accumulates cadmium from the soil in which it grows.

Amanita strobiliformis has been found to accumulate copper, cadmium, lead, zinc and especially silver. One study found Amanita strobiliformis fruitbodies could contain a phenomenal 1,000 mg/kg of silver in dry weight when the soil contained below 1 mg/kg (note 5).

Recognising Older Fruitbodies

Finally, here are some more photos of the Amanita strobiliformis fruitbodies we’ve found.

These ones were not as perfect as some, but the colours of the cap and stem and the characteristic shape of the stem base give the game away:

Warted Amanita, Amanita strobiliformis. On a road verge on the edge of Litcham Common, Norfolk. 16th September 2024.

In the last couple of very dry summers we’ve found that larger fungi can dry out and persist for several weeks in an almost mummified form where they often become hard to identify (note 6).

A couple of weeks ago we found a couple of dried out Amanita strobiliformis fruitbodies, long past their prime, by the roadside on a hill near West Acre.

Old, dried out specimens of Warted Amanita, Amanita strobiliformis. West Acre, Norfolk, 18th September 2026.

Notes

Note 1 – For further reading I recommend “The Genus Amanita in Britain” by Geoffrey Kibby. (Second edition, September 2016.) The book is an invaluable guide to these large, charismatic fungi, which: “include some of the most striking and beautiful members of our forest and downland mycota”.

Note 2 – Most of a fungus is a mass of mycelium, out of sight in the soil, wood or leaf litter. Mushrooms (fungal fruitbodies) are merely the fruiting part of a fungus, rather like fruits on a plant, such as apples on an apple tree. Picking a fungal fruitbody won’t harm the fungus and it is often necessary to pick and collect a fruitbody to identify it. Where this isn’t necessary it is better to leave them in place for the enjoyment of other people and, most importantly, because they provide food for other animals and shelter for a range of invertebrates, from beetles to springtails and mites. Leaving a fruitbody in place also gives it the chance to release its spores.

In this case I think picking was the right option. I came back about an hour later and the grass had been mown and the Scaly Earthballs (Scleroderma verrucosum) further along the road verge had been sliced up into small pieces.

Note 3 – Some species of Amanita are edible when well cooked, including the Tawny Grisette (Amanita fulva) and The Blusher (Amanita rubescens) but toxic when raw. I ate Tawny Grisette once and it was OK but not one of the best fungi I’ve tasted.

Note 4 – I wrote about a couple of “new for Norfolk” species of Cortinarius in my October 2025 blog post, “Five Fungi from Sweet Briar Marshes“.

Note 5 – See, for example:

• “Disentangling the factors of contrasting silver and copper accumulation in sporocarps of the ectomycorrhizal fungus Amanita strobiliformis from two sites“.  Jan Borovi?ka, Tereza Konvalinková, Anna Žigová, Jana ?urišová, Milan Gryndler, Hana Hršelová, Jan Kameník, Tereza Leonhardt, Jan Sácký. Science of The Total Environment,
  Vol. 694, article 133679 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.133679.
• “Silver Chloride Precipitation-limiting Factor for Accurate Silver Determination in Ag-accumulating Mushrooms After Nitric Acid Digestion“. Iva Synková & Jan Borovi?ka. Biological Trace Element Research (2025). Vol. 203, pp5815–5826. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12011-025-04605-1.

Note 6 – It’s annoying to find boletes that have dried out and lost their colour and/or ability to change colour when cut, so as to be unidentifiable.