A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1068 entries
witch’s hat
The witch’s hat is a waxcap of old grassland with a sharply conical cap in scarlet, orange, or yellow, and one property that identifies it: Every part of it turns black. Bruised, aged, or picked, the whole fungus blackens from the edges inward within hours, so a patch in the turf can show bright cones and black ones side by side.
Etymology
The English name is for the conical shape and the color together. It is also called the blackening waxcap, which is the more useful name in the field, and the Latin species name simply means conical.
Notes
It is one of the indicator species for unimproved grassland, which is ground that has never been plowed, fertilized, or reseeded and which takes many decades to develop. The blackening is a chemical oxidation and it is permanent, so a specimen collected for a survey arrives at the table looking like charcoal regardless of how it started.