Olive Salver, Catinella olivacea

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Olive Salver, Catinella olivacea

Olive Salver, Catinella olivacea

On the morning of the last Sunday of November Vanna, James and I were in Whitlingham Woods (part of Whitlingham Country Park), near Norwich, searching for harvestmen in the leaf litter.

Vanna, at the front, turned over a big piece of rotten wood and called us over to see some lovely cup fungi she’d found, growing on the underside of the log.

We took photos and, when we arrived home, identified the fungi as the Olive Salver, Catinella olivacea (note 1).

Small but very beautiful

Catinella olivacea is a small but very beautiful cup fungus. The cup surface is a dark olive-green and looks like a decorative ceramic dish, making the English name of Olive Salver very appropriate. The cups have a yellowish furrowed margin. Individual cups can eventually reach 13mm across but ours were much smaller than this.

Like other cup fungi Catinella olivacea is an Ascomycete. The cup (the apothecium) is the fruiting body of the fungus and it is formed of a mixture of sterile tissues and special, elongated sacs known as asci that shoot out their spores (note 2).

An unusual way to spread spores

Most cup fungi grow on top of soil, wood or other substrates and their spores are dispersed in air currents but Catinella olivacea is tucked away under rotting logs and has evolved another strategy to disperse its spores. The fertile surface of its apothecium is gelatinous at maturity and when the ascospores are shot out they are trapped in sticky droplets. When a passing invertebrate walks across the surface of the cup the droplets with spores stick onto the visitor and it will move them elsewhere. Rotting logs are home to springtails, woodlice, millipedes, centipedes and other arthropods, including the harvestmen Vanna was looking for, so there is no shortage of potential spore spreaders (note 3).

I was tempted to take a piece of Catinella olivacea to look at more closely but ours were young specimens and it seemed a shame to disturb them. The cup surface turns purple when potassium hydroxide is applied to it and the spores look like tiny footprints. (See also Malcolm Storey’s photos on the Discover Life website.)

Olive Salver, Catinella olivacea

Olive Salver, Catinella olivacea

Quite a rare find

At the time of writing there are 125 records of Catinella olivacea in the NBN Atlas, from Cornwall to Cumbria and North Yorkshire and in Northern Ireland. Ours was the ninth record of the species in Norfolk and the first since 1999.

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) website shows the global distribution of Catinella olivacea: it occurs in other parts of Europe and in North America. There is are outlying records from Asia (the far east of Russia), South America (French Guiana) and Africa (Democratic Republic of Congo) (note 4).

Who knows how common Catinella olivacea actually is? Læssøe and Petersen describe it as “occasional” and Sterry and Hughes say “uncommon to rare” (note 1) but the Naturespot website says it is “quite common”.

It is likely to be under-recorded. In the course of a normal fungal foray Catinella olivacea would be an unlikely find because everyone looks on top of logs, rather than beneath them. Some logs are just too big to lift anyway. Not all logs are suitable: they need to be well rotted and have enough of a gap underneath for Olive Salvers to grow. Old logs can be scarce: too many are tidied away or used for firewood (note 5).

It pays to be a generalist. The beauty of looking for life in general is that you find things you weren’t expecting. We found our harvestmen but so much more as well.

Nemastoma bimaculatum

Harvestman Nemastoma bimaculatum 

A suitable log.

A suitable log: Oliver Salvers (Catinella olivacea) lurk beneath.

Notes

Note 1 – Catinella olivacea is on page 1450 of “Fungi of Temperate Europe” by Thomas Læssøe and Jens H Petersen (Princeton University Press, 2019). The book is in two volumes and contains over 7,000 photographs of more than 2,800 species of fungi. Its size and weight mean that it is definitely not a field guide, but is a useful reference book for use at home.

Catinella olivacea is also illustrated with other “discos and ascos” on page 317 of Sterry and Hughes’ book “Collins Complete British Mushrooms and Toadstools”. I’m not sure I would have recognised our specimens from the photo, however, because it shows a mass of older, darker specimens.

There are some good photos on the web. The MycoKey website has photos from England, Denmark and Germany and Mycoquebec.org website shows specimens from Quebec.

Kew’s Catalogue of Life website lists other synonyms for Catinella olivacea. One of these is Karschia olivacea.

Note 2 – I’ve written about several other fungi on this blog, including Dune Cup, Scarlet Elfcup, Alder Goblet and Spring Hazelcup.

Note 3 – This disperal of Catinella olivacea spores is described in “With a Little Help from Arthropods: Catinella olivacea” on Jan Thornhill’s Weird and Wonderful Wild Mushrooms blog and is referred to in the 2007 paper “Ascoma development and phylogeny of an apothecioid dothideomycete, Catinella olivacea” by M.D. Greif, C.F. Gibas, A. Tsuneda and R.S. Currah. (Am J. Bot.  Vol 94, pp1890-1899).

Note 4 – The holotype (the original type specimen upon which the description and name of the species is based) is held by the Meise Botanic Garden in Belgium and was found in the Belgian Congo in 1907. (As a strange coincidence I’ve just started reading “Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart” by Tim Butcher, a 2007 book describing a journey in the modern Democratic Republic of Congo.)

Note 5 – The cost of living crisis doesn’t help, either, as people gather up wood to burn. Our local cemetery is one just a few places in the British Isles where the harvestman Dicranopalpus larvatus can be found, usually under pieces of dead wood. Recently someone has been gathering rotten sticks and branches for firewood, inadvertently removing prime habitat for the species.

Hoary Mullein, Verbascum pulverulentum

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Hoary Mullein, Verbascum pulverulentum

Hoary Mullein, Verbascum pulverulentum. By UEA Playing Fields, Norwich, 5th July 2021.

One of Norwich’s local specialities is Hoary Mullein, Verbascum pulverulentum. It’s a spectacular plant and one I’m lucky to see every year. Nationally, it is mostly found in East Anglia and it is particularly abundant to the south and west of the city. The grounds of the University of East Anglia (UEA) are a good place to see it (note 1).

Hoary Mullein is thought to be a native plant (note 2) and it grows as a biennial or monocarpic perennial, producing its flowers once from its second year onwards, setting seed and dying. Flowers are produced from late June to August, usually peaking in July.

The spectacular flower spikes, which bear long side branches like a candelabra, can reach 1.5 – 2 metres (5 – 6.5 feet) tall. Individual flowers are pale yellow with whitish stamen hairs. The green parts of the plant are covered in a dense felt of white matted hairs, which gives the plants a frosted appearance. These hairs wear off and gather together to form distinctive balls of fluff.

Too late for that now: at the moment you’ll only find old seed heads or rosettes of the plant’s basal leaves. These are floppy and have a dense felt-like mat of hairs on the undersuface. They stay green all winter.

Hoary Mullein, Verbsacum pulverulentum

Basal rosettes of Hoary Mullein, Verbsacum pulverulentum. UEA, Norwich, 14th November 2022. (The yellow flower is a Dandelion.) This south-facing bank on well drained soil provides perfect growing conditions for Hoary Mullein.

Verbascum pulverulentum is a member of the Scrophulariaceae (Figwort family). There are around a dozen species of Verbascum growing wild in the British Isles and plants hybridise readily (note 3), which can make identification rather tricky.

The Flora of East Anglia and Wild Flower Finder websites have some great photos of Hoary Mullein.

Mulleins make good garden plants. They prefer light soils and a sunny spot. Plants produce a long tap root and cope well with droughts. There are tips on which species to grow and how to grow them on the Gardeners’ World, Gardens Illustrated and Garden Design Journal websites.

One of my favourite garden Verbascums is Verbascum chaixii ‘Album’, which has white flowers with red-purple centres. Our back garden is a bit too shady in winter for Verbascums to thrive but I grow a couple of species on the light sandy soil on my allotment: Great Mullein (Verbascum thapsus) and Dark Mullein (Verbascum nigrum). The former can grow as tall as Verbascum pulverulentum but the flower spikes don’t branch. The latter behaved as a short-lived perennial for me, flowering several years in a row, though it is supposed to be a biennial. This year I had a spectacular self-sown plant with flowers like Dark Mullein and a growth habit more like Great Mullein, presumably a hybrid.

Mulleins don’t make good eating and the Plants for a Future website lists no known edible uses for Verbascum pulverulentum. It also warns that those fluffy hairs can act as an irritant. The plant contains a rich mixture of compounds (note 4). Two of these, listed by the Plants for a Future website, are coumarin and also rotenone (note 5). The latter has been used as an insecticide and fish poison (note 6).

One insect that thrives on Verbascum leaves is the Mullein Moth. I’ve never seen the moth, which flies in April and May, but the beautiful caterpillars are a common sight in early summer in the south of England, including Norfolk. They also feed on Buddleja leaves. They can strip whole Verbascum plants but usually (in my experience) the plants usually survive, flower and set seed (note 7).

Mullein Moth caterpillar

The very hungry caterpillar: Mullein Moth, Cucullia verbasci.

The name Verbascum is a corruption of the Latin adjective barbascum, which means “with a beard”, a reference to these plants’ hairy leaves.

The origin of the English name is less clear. “Mullein” may come from a word for yellow, but another explanation is that it is a corruption of the Latin “mollis” meaning soft. It is usually pronounced “mullen”.

On a related note, one of the American names for Great Mullein (Verbascum thapsus) is “cowboy toilet paper“, presumably a reference to the soft, strong (and rather long) leaves.

Notes

Note 1 – “By the A14 near Bury St. Edmunds” in Suffolk is apparently another good place to see it. “A Flora of Norfolk” mentions the shingle bank between Snettisham and Heacham as another hot spot. (Gillian Beckett, Alec Bull and Robin Stevenson, “A Flora of Norfolk”.  Privately published, 1999).

Outside the British Isles, Verbascum pulverulentum is native elsewhere in Europe (Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Corse, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, Romania, Sardegna, Sicilia, Spain, Switzerland and the former Yugoslavia) and has been introduced into Austria and Madeira and the United States (Washington state).

Note 2 – Stace (note 3) says Verbascum pulverulentum is “probably native” on chalky soils in East Anglia and a casual or naturalised escape elsewhere. The Flora of East Anglia website says it is “of uncertain origin, perhaps native”.

Note 3 – Clive Stace, “New Flora of the British Isles“, Fourth Edition, 2019. Verbascum species are listed on pages 639 – 642.

Note 4 – Blanco-Salas et. al. (2021) have looked into the phytochemistry of Verbascum plants in relation to their use in Spanish folk medicine. The results can be found in “Searching for Scientific Explanations for the Uses of Spanish Folk Medicine: A Review on the Case of Mullein (Verbascum, Scrophulariaceae)“, Biology Vol. 10 p618.

Note 5 – The Plants for a Future website notes that the quantities are not given.

Note 6 – I remember using “Derris dust” as a garden insecticide back in the late 1970s; its active ingredient was rotenone. You could still buy it in the UK until around 2009.

Even if it was still available I wouldn’t use it. Although rotenone degrades quite quickly, it is completely indiscriminate in its action and will kill other arthropods as well as the “pest” being targeted. There are also links between its usage and Parkinson’s disease.

I’ve only just realised, in researching this blog post, that Derris is a genus of leguminous plant (family Fabaceae). Species of Derris include the Tuba plant (Derris elliptica) and Jewel Vine (Derris involuta), whose roots were used to make the powder.

Aromatic Pinkgill, Entoloma pleopodium

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Aromatic Pinkgill, Entoloma pleopodium

Aromatic Pinkgill, Entoloma pleopodium.

On Saturday I went on a fungal foray at Gressenhall with Norfolk Fungus Study Group. We saw a great selection of woodland fungi.

Vanna stayed in Norwich and, on the way back from visiting her Mum, went for a wander in Earlham Cemetery in the late afternoon. She brought me back a lovely fungus, one I hadn’t seen before, the Aromatic Pinkgill, Entoloma pleopodium.

Aromatic Pinkgills have previously been found in Norfolk 16 times and the fungus is described by the First Nature website as an occasional find in Britain and Ireland. It also occurs throughout much of mainland Europe, from Scandinavia down to the Mediterranean and the Iberian Peninsula. It was seen in a different part of Earlham Cemetery in 2014.

It’s a very pretty fungus and, if the conditions are right, it has a strong smell of pear drops or ripe apples. There was no smell on Saturday, or on Sunday when Vanna took me to have a look, perhaps because the fungi were rather wet. But on Monday it was sunny and dry and when I showed the fungus to our friend Ian it had a distinctive smell, which reminded me of pear drops, though Ian thought it was more like marshmallow or even bubblegum (note 1).

But the mowers were out in force that day and by the Tuesday there was no sign of Aromatic Pinkgill or any of the other grassland fungi that we’d enjoyed seeing the day before. Another friend visited that day and found short grass, lots of wet grass cuttings and no fungi.

Aromatic Pinkgill, Entoloma pleopodium

More Aromatic Pinkgills, Entoloma pleopodium.

The fungal fruit bodies we see are like the tip of an iceberg. with most of the fungus existing underground as a mycelium. Mowing removes the above ground parts of the fungus but it lives on underground – albeit unable to spread its spores (or to be noticed and recorded).

Strangely, heavy handed cemetery management may actually help this fungus. The Aromatic Pinkgill favours rich soil, often in places where Stinging Nettles grow and the area where we saw ours was a seam of rich soil, presumably churned up by machinery a year or so before when a tree was planted.

Pinkgill fungi (Entoloma) are members of the family Entolomataceae.  They have pinkish gills and pink spores and variously coloured caps. Most can be found in grassland and several species are indicators of good quality grassland. Entoloma comes from two ancient Greek words: entos (inner) lóma (a fringe or a hem). This is a reference to the inrolled cap margins of many of these fungi.

Nearby, we saw Wood Pinkgills (Entoloma rhodopolium), not quite as pretty and with no noticeable smell.

Wood Pinkgill, Entoloma rhodopolium

Wood Pinkgills, Entoloma rhodopolium

And of the Pinkgills that smell, not all are as lovely as the Aromatic Pinkgill. The Mousepee Pinkgill, Entoloma incanum, is said to have an odour reminiscent of caged mice, a fact I can confirm, having found some in North Norfolk a couple of weeks ago.

Notes

Note 1 (Added November 2022) – A week or so after the original Aromatic Pinkgills were cut there were some more, though smaller than the first ones.

I was able to visit the fungi a couple more times, and show them to some friends. We concluded that the way to smell them is to squeeze a piece of the cap and then sniff. This gives a strong and reliable scent of pear drops.