Parrot waxcapGliophorus psittacinus

The parrot waxcap (Gliophorus psittacinus, still often listed as Hygrocybe psittacina), also called the parrot toadstool, is one of the few truly green mushrooms in Europe. It's a small waxcap with a bell-shaped cap coated in thick, glossy slime. Young caps are bright green, but they fade to yellow, orange or pinkish with age, so a single troop can show all these colours at once, like a parrot's plumage.

How do you identify a parrot waxcap? The cap is 1.5 to 4 cm across, occasionally 5 cm, bell-shaped at first and later flattened with a low bump, with a finely lined margin when wet. Everything about it is slimy: cap, gills and stem. The gills are thick, waxy and widely spaced, greenish near the stem and yellow towards the edge. The stem is slim with no ring, yellow to orange-yellow and green at the top. That green stem apex stays even on old, yellowed caps and is the best clue. The spore print is white.

Where does it grow? In old, unimproved grassland that hasn't been ploughed or fertilised for decades: grazed pasture, old lawns, churchyards, verges and mossy banks, sometimes woodland clearings. It's common in old grassland, lawns and churchyards. Look for it from late summer to early winter, with most finds in mid to late autumn. It isn't rare or protected, but its presence is a sign of old grassland, and every waxcap species found on a site counts towards its conservation value: under the JNCC guidelines, a grassland with 19 or more waxcap species can be considered for SSSI status.

Is the parrot waxcap edible? Not really. Some guides call it edible but not worth eating, others inedible: it's tiny and very slimy, and mycologists ask people to leave waxcaps where they are. We know of no reported poisonings. A single German test in 1986 found traces of psilocybin in one sample, but this has never been confirmed, and it isn't regarded as a psychedelic mushroom. It's best enjoyed with a camera.

What can you mistake it for? The blackening waxcap grows on the same lawns but is larger, with a conical orange or red cap that's never green, and it turns black with age and handling. The verdigris roundhead is also green and slimy, but has a ring, white flecks on the cap and a dark purple-brown spore print. The yellowleg bonnet has a sticky yellow stem, but an olive-brown cap and white gills. The heath waxcap is orange-brown with slightly decurrent gills and no green stem top, and the rare jubilee waxcap is dull purple with a white stem. If a greenish-yellow mushroom in grass bruises blue-green on the stem and smells of mice, it may be the poisonous mousepee pinkgill, so leave it alone.

Waxcaps depend on living grassland plants: their threads have been found inside the roots of grasses. That's why they vanish after ploughing and fertiliser and can't be grown in the lab.