Dead wood

The most popular edible "wood-eaters"

For a forager, dead wood is one of the most generous substrates, because a single large stump can produce several buckets of mushrooms:

1. Oyster mushroom (Pleurotus ostreatus): A classic wood saprotroph. It never attacks living trees and settles only on standing dead trees or fallen trunks of broadleaf species (oak, hornbeam, willow). This is exactly why the oyster mushroom is the easiest to grow at home on sawdust.

2. Velvet shank / Enoki (Flammulina velutipes): Appears in late autumn or winter on dead trunks of lindens, poplars or old apple trees.

3. Sheathed woodtuft (Kuehneromyces mutabilis): Covers old rotting birch and linden stumps en masse in damp woods.

4. Coral tooth (Hericium coralloides): This incredibly beautiful mushroom, which looks like white sea coral, grows only on dead fallen trunks of broadleaf trees (most often oak or beech).

Dead or alive?

As David Arora points out, many mushrooms can be both parasites and saprotrophs.

For example, honey fungus can attack a living tree (as a parasite), kill it, and then keep growing on its dead stump (now as a saprotroph) for 10 years, until nothing is left of the stump but dust.

But if you see a mushroom on a tree that lost its leaves and bark long ago, it's 100% a saprotroph and completely harmless to the healthy trees around it (in your garden, for example).