Umbrella polypore or Giant polypore

A large bushy fruiting body 20-50 cm across, with 50-200 small caps on a shared stem. Each cap is 1-4 cm across, round, convex to flat, with a slightly depressed centre. The surface is smooth or finely felty. The colour is grey-brown or ochre-brown, with fine radiating fibres, paler when young and darker with age.

The fruit body is made of many fan- or tongue-shaped caps overlapping on a shared base. Each cap is 10 to 30 cm wide and 1 to 3 cm thick, and the whole rosette is usually 50 to 80 cm across, sometimes over a metre, and can weigh tens of kilograms.

Young caps are yellow-brown to cinnamon, later chestnut brown with darker concentric zones and a paler cream margin. The surface is felty, finely fibrous or finely scaly. The margin is wavy, blunt and rounded when young, thinner with age.

Underneath are tubes ending in fine, tiny white pores (1-3 pores/mm). They're white to cream and run down the stem. Spore print white.

The pore surface is white to cream, later dirty greyish. The pores are small and round, 3 to 5 per millimetre, and the short tubes, 4 to 6 mm deep, run slightly down the base.

The key feature: the pores quickly bruise brown and then black when touched or damaged. The spore print is white.

Each little cap sits on a thin central stem 1-3 cm tall and 0.3-0.5 cm thick, white or greyish white. A shared branching stem at the base joins them all and runs down into the underground sclerotium.

There's no true stem. The caps narrow into short stalk-like bases that merge into a shared, lumpy base, often rising from buried roots.

The flesh is pure white, brittle when young and somewhat tough when old. It doesn't change colour when cut. The smell is pleasantly mushroomy with a hint of flour or cucumber, and the taste is mild, sweetish, not bitter.

The flesh is white, sometimes pinkish. It's soft and juicy only when very young, then fibrous and almost leathery. When cut it turns reddish, then black.

Pleasantly mushroomy with a hint of flour and fresh cucumber, which is characteristic of the species.

The smell isn't distinctive. The taste is slightly sour, especially in older fruit bodies.