Funeral bellGalerina marginata

The funeral bell (Galerina marginata), also called the deadly galerina or autumn skullcap, is a deadly poisonous mushroom. It contains the same amatoxins as the death cap, and some specimens have been found to carry just as much. It's a small brown mushroom with a thin ring on the stem that grows on rotting wood, often right next to edible stump mushrooms, which is exactly why it matters to anyone who picks honey fungus or sheathed woodtuft.

It grows on well-rotted wood of both conifers and broadleaved trees: stumps, logs, fallen branches, buried wood and bark mulch, and also among moss, so it can look as if it's coming straight out of the ground. You'll find it singly, in small groups or in tufts. It is widespread across Europe and the rest of the northern hemisphere, from lowland woods to the mountains. Most fruiting happens from late summer to late autumn, with a peak in September and October, and in mild weather it carries on into December, right when people are out collecting honey fungus. It can turn up in early summer too, and in parts of Europe it has been recorded in every month, so no month is safe.

How do you tell it from sheathed woodtuft? By eye it's very hard, and no single feature is a guarantee. The best field mark is the stem below the ring: the woodtuft has small dark shaggy scales there, like a little boot, while the funeral bell has only pale silvery fibres running lengthwise. Woodtuft usually grows in large, dense tufts, the funeral bell more often in small groups. But old woodtufts lose their scales, funeral bells can grow in tufts too, and the two can share the same piece of wood, even in mixed groups, which is how a single funeral bell ends up in a basket of woodtufts. Both leave the same rusty brown spore print, and only a microscope separates them for certain. That's why field guides advise beginners not to collect sheathed woodtuft at all, and experienced foragers to check every single mushroom rather than the whole tuft.

Honey fungus is easier, because its spore print is white and the funeral bell's is rusty brown. Leave a cap gills down on a sheet of paper for a few hours and the colour of the print will tell you. Often you can already see white spore dust on the lower caps of a honey fungus cluster. Honey fungus is also bigger and fleshier, with small dark scales on the cap and a broad ring. Velvet shank also gives a white print, has no ring at all and a velvety stem that darkens towards the base. And it isn't a magic mushroom: a few people looking for Psilocybe on wood chips have eaten funeral bells by mistake, and Psilocybe species leave a purple-brown print, not a rusty one.

What are the symptoms? They don't start straight away but 6 to 24 hours after the meal: severe vomiting, diarrhoea and stomach pain. Then the person may seem to get better, but that recovery is false: the toxin keeps destroying the liver, and liver failure follows within a few days. Boiling, frying, drying and freezing don't destroy the toxin, and throwing away the cooking water doesn't help either. If you or someone close to you has eaten mushrooms that might have included a funeral bell, call emergency services or a poison centre straight away (112 in Europe) and don't wait for symptoms. Keep any leftovers or photos, as they help the doctors.