White spring mushrooms: St George's mushroom and its lookalikes

Find a firm white or cream mushroom in grass or at a woodland edge between April and June, with very crowded narrow white gills, a strong smell of fresh flour and a white spore print, and it's most likely St George's mushroom. But spring has more white gilled mushrooms than you might think. The same weeks bring the deadly fibrecap (deadly poisonous, just as the name says), garden pinkgills with pink gills and white spring cavaliers; later on, the funnels and the livid pinkgill join them. What tells them apart isn't the color of the cap but the gills, the smell and the color of the spores.

The cover shows a cluster of cream caps among oak leaves, found in May 2026. They look very much like St George's mushroom, but they didn't go in the basket. Below we explain why, and show what this mushroom gets confused with.

St George's mushroom: how to recognize it

St George's mushroom is one of the few large gilled mushrooms of spring. In Britain it is named after St George because it appears around 23 April, St George's Day. Its season runs from April to June, earlier in southern Europe and later in the north.

Check all of these features together, not just one of them:

• Cap 5–15 cm, white or cream, almost spherical when young, then convex, often irregular, with an inrolled margin.
• Gills white, very crowded and narrow, notched where they meet the stem. They do not turn pink or brown with age.
• Stem short, thick, firm, often curved, with no ring.
• Smell strong and mealy, like wet flour or raw dough. You smell it best on a cut surface.
• Spore print white.

St George's mushroom grows in meadows and pastures, on mown verges along hedgerows, in gardens and at the edges of broadleaf woods, often near hazel, oak, beech and birch. It likes limestone soils, returns to the same spot year after year and sometimes forms “fairy rings”. Our species card lists it as edible. As with any wild mushroom, boil it for at least 15 minutes; see our cheat sheet how long to boil mushrooms for more.

Our May find: why only “probably”

We found the mushrooms on the cover at the end of May in an oak wood: three firm cream caps clustered among dry leaves. When we turned one over, the gills were crowded, narrow and creamy white. We've already shown these top and underside shots in the article mushrooms we left in the forest.

So why didn't we take them? Because from the photos alone the identification stayed at “probably”. And photos can't show the two things that settle it here: the smell of a cut surface and the color of the spore print. On top of that, the end of May is exactly when St George's mushroom's main lookalike appears in broadleaf woods.

Deadly fibrecap: the main risk

The deadly fibrecap (now placed in the genus Inosperma) appears from the end of May and keeps going until July, and in Britain even until September. It grows at woodland edges, in parks, on lawns and under shrubs, most often under beech, linden and hornbeam on limestone soils. In other words, often the very same places as St George's mushroom.

It contains muscarine. Field guides call it deadly poisonous, and it's the one fibrecap with reliably documented deaths. The first signs of poisoning appear anywhere from a few minutes to two hours after eating: heavy sweating and salivation, tears, narrowed pupils, abdominal pain, vomiting. If you suspect this, call emergency services at once (103 in Ukraine, 112 across the EU), and read about the first steps in the article mushroom poisoning.

How to tell it apart:

• It turns red. The fibrecap's cap and stem redden with age and where touched, and the fibres at the cap margin turn brick-colored. St George's mushroom doesn't redden.
• Cap conical and silky when young, with radial fibres; in dry weather the margin splits.
• Gills whitish at first, then pinkish brown, and the spore print is brown, not white.
• Smell fruity in young ones, sweetish and musty in old ones, but not strongly mealy.

Young mushrooms that haven't started to redden yet are the most treacherous. That's why we never take a white May mushroom without a clear, strong mealy smell.

Pinkgills: pink gills and pink spores

A few days before the oak-wood find, a mushroom with a white, wavy cap came up in a garden among weeds and pebbles. Underneath were pink gills notched at the stem, a white fibrous stem with no ring, and ochre stains at the base. It's most likely Entoloma saepium, which grows in spring under trees and shrubs of the rose family such as hawthorn, blackthorn and rowan. Its English name hints at exactly those orange stains.

The pink of the gills comes from the spores: every pinkgill has a pink spore print. That rules out St George's mushroom at once, since its gills and spores are white. But telling the spring pinkgills apart from one another by eye is very hard. A close relative of E. saepium is the shield pinkgill (E. clypeatum), with a gray-brown cap, which grows in the same weeks under fruit trees. Our species card lists it as conditionally edible, but the British guide First Nature calls its edibility doubtful, and says E. saepium is better not picked at all, because it's easily confused with a poisonous relative.

That relative is the livid pinkgill (E. sinuatum). It grows in broadleaf woods from early summer to late autumn, so it's unlikely to turn up in May. But it's linked to a large share of mushroom poisonings in Europe: severe abdominal pain, vomiting and diarrhea that drag on for a long time. It also smells mealy or musty, so your nose won't save you here. That's exactly why our garden mushroom stayed in the garden.

Cavaliers: white spring mushrooms you can't tell apart by eye

On the same May day as the “St George's mushroom”, we found two more white mushrooms in the oak wood: flat, smooth caps with an ochre patch in the center, among oak leaves and grass.

Our first thought was the spring fieldcap, which is also pale and also appears in May. In the hand, though, we could see crowded beige gills and a white fibrous stem with no ring, whereas the fieldcap's gills turn brown with age and young ones have a ring. After several checks we settled on the genus Melanoleuca (cavaliers), a group of white spring species close to M. strictipes.

Why is this a reason to leave the mushroom alone rather than a triumph of identification? Melanoleuca is a difficult genus: its species can only be told apart under a microscope, by their spores and special cells on the gills. Their spore print is white or pale yellowish, like that of St George's mushroom, so it doesn't rule them out. The white spring M. strictipes grows in meadows, at woodland edges and by hedgerows, almost the same places as St George's mushroom. English Wikipedia names it outright as a lookalike of St George's mushroom, and the Scandinavian identification guide Funga Nordica considers it mildly poisonous.

This shot shows the mushroom from the side: an almost flat, thin cap on a stem that's longer and thinner than in St George's mushroom. St George's mushroom is usually the opposite, fleshy with a short, thick stem. But shape is a hint, not proof.

Funnels: white, mealy-smelling, but later in the year

Meadows also hold another group of white mushrooms people fear: the small white funnels, such as the ivory funnel. They too grow in grass, on verges and in parks, often in rings; they have a white spore print and contain muscarine. Their main season runs from the second half of summer into early winter, so in May they're usually not up yet. But if you come across a white mushroom in grass in summer, keep them in mind: the cap is thin, and the gills are attached to the stem or run slightly down it. More in the article the miller and the poisonous funnels.

How to check a white spring mushroom

A short checklist we keep in our own heads:

1. Smell of a cut surface. A strong, clean smell of fresh flour points to St George's mushroom. Fruity, musty or faint: stop. But pinkgills can smell mealy too, so smell alone isn't enough.
2. Gill color. White all its life: St George's mushroom. Pink: a pinkgill. Pinkish brown and reddening: a fibrecap. Beige and browning: other genera.
3. Spore print. Lay the cap gills down on a sheet of paper for a few hours. For St George's mushroom the print must be white; pink means a pinkgill, brown means a fibrecap or a fieldcap.
4. Reddening. Press the cap and stem and wait. Any reddening and the mushroom stays where it is.
5. Build. A firm, fleshy cap and a short, thick stem are typical of St George's mushroom. A slender, long-stemmed mushroom with a thin cap should make you doubt.

If even one feature doesn't match or can't be checked, the mushroom stays in the forest. The rest of our rules are in the article seven rules of safe foraging.

Where and when to look in spring

In April there are still few gilled mushrooms in the forest, and the month's main finds are morels and false morels. In our April photos a birch wood is carpeted with lesser celandine and its yellow flowers, which bloom in April and May.

St George's mushroom appears from April to June, most often in May. Don't look for it deep in the forest but in grassy places: woodland edges, clearings, old orchards and meadows near scrub.

On the same April day we also looked into a city park by a pond. There's grass here too, plus broadleaf trees and woodland edges, exactly the kind of places St George's mushroom likes.

But parks are also home to the deadly fibrecap, which grows on lawns and under linden trees. On top of that, urban mushrooms accumulate heavy metals, so we don't consider them for the basket. Why? See the article can you pick mushrooms in a city or park.

By the end of May the forest looks different: thick grass, young leaves, unfurled ferns. It was on just such a day that we found both the “St George's mushroom” and the cavaliers in the oak wood. This is when the seasons of St George's mushroom and the deadly fibrecap overlap, so take extra care.