Blushing bracketDaedaleopsis confragosa

The blushing bracket (Daedaleopsis confragosa) is a tough brown bracket fungus most often seen in tiers on dead and dying willows, especially beside rivers and streams. It has a simple, safe identification trick: press the fresh, pale underside and within moments it blushes pink to red, later turning brown. That's where its English name comes from. The genus name recalls Daedalus and his labyrinth, because one bracket can carry round pores, slits, mazes and almost gill-like plates. James Bolton described it from old trees near Halifax in 1791.

How do you identify a blushing bracket? It has no stem and is semicircular, kidney- or fan-shaped and flat, often with a hump where it's attached, usually 5 to 15 cm across, up to 20 cm, and 1 to 4 cm thick. It grows singly or in tiers. Young brackets are whitish or leather-yellow on top, then reddish brown, brick red, greyish or blackish, with concentric zones and grooves, radial wrinkles and small warts, mostly near the base. The margin is paler. The underside starts white to cream, as if frosted, then turns beige and grey-brown. Near the base the pores are round, then they stretch into slits and mazes, and towards the edge they're almost gills, 0.5 to 1.5 mm across. The flesh is corky and leathery, wood-coloured to pale rusty. The spore print is white.

Where does it grow? On dead and dying trunks and branches of broadleaved trees, above all willow, also alder, birch, hazel, poplar, beech and others, and sometimes in wounds of living trees. It causes a white rot. The brackets last more than one season, so you can see it all year round, and it's most noticeable from late summer to late autumn. It stands out on riverside willows in midwinter, when few other large fungi are around.

Is the blushing bracket edible? No, it's far too tough and corky. We found no reports of poisoning, but it isn't eaten. Substances from it have only been studied in the laboratory, so there's no evidence that a tea or extract made from it helps with anything.

What can you mistake it for? Turkey tail is thinner and velvety, with many coloured zones, and its underside has tiny round white pores with no slits or mazes, and it doesn't blush. The birch polypore grows only on birch and has a smooth pale-brown top with an inrolled rim, soft white flesh and fine round pores. Hairy curtain crust forms thin, wavy crusts with a smooth yellow-orange underside and no pores. Outside our catalogue, the oak mazegill (Daedalea quercina) has a coarse maze of thick-walled pores and grows on oak stumps, the birch mazegill (Lenzites betulinus) has true gill-like plates underneath, and the lumpy bracket (Trametes gibbosa) has a white, often algae-green top. A thin, reddish, gilled form is sometimes treated as a separate species, Daedaleopsis tricolor, but DNA studies haven't been able to separate it from the blushing bracket.