Turkey tailTrametes versicolor

Turkey tail (Trametes versicolor), written turkeytail in British checklists and once known as the many-zoned polypore, is one of the commonest bracket fungi in Europe. It forms thin, leathery, fan-shaped brackets banded in brown, grey, ochre, near-black and sometimes bluish shades, always with a pale edge. They grow in overlapping tiers on stumps, logs and fallen branches, and no two clusters look quite the same.

You'll find it in almost any wood, park or old hedge with dead broadleaved timber, most often beech and oak, and only rarely on conifers. It rots wood by breaking down lignin, a so-called white rot. The brackets last a long time and survive the winter, so it can be seen all year round, but it's most noticeable from autumn to early spring, when fresh growth appears and the leaves are down.

How do you identify turkey tail? Turn a bracket over. The underside is white to cream and covered in tiny round pores, 3 to 6 per millimetre, easy to see with a hand lens. On top, look for velvety concentric zones in contrasting colours and a pale margin. The bracket is only 1 to 3 mm thick and bends when fresh.

Turkey tail or false turkey tail? The bracket people most often mistake for it is usually hairy curtain crust (Stereum hirsutum). Its upper side is similarly zoned and hairy, but the underside is completely smooth and yellow to orange, with no pores at all. The true false turkey tail, Stereum ostrea, is a mostly tropical species and barely recorded in Europe. Other lookalikes have their own giveaways on the underside: birch mazegill has gill-like plates, smoky bracket has grey pores, purplepore bracket has violet ones on conifer wood, and mossy maze polypore has long slot-like pores. Hairy bracket is thicker, whitish or grey, coarsely hairy and lacks the bright bands.

Is turkey tail edible or poisonous? It isn't a food mushroom: it's far too tough and leathery to chew. It isn't considered poisonous either, and none of its common lookalikes is known to be dangerous. In China and Japan it has long been used as a tea or extract rather than eaten.

What about its medicinal use? Most research looked at purified extracts, PSK and PSP, rather than the mushroom itself. In Japan PSK was used alongside chemotherapy from 1976 until its maker stopped producing it in 2017. Some trials, mostly Japanese and Chinese, found a modest benefit as an add-on to treatment for stomach and bowel cancers, while others found none. The extracts don't treat cancer on their own, and a home-made tea or a shop supplement isn't the same thing. If you're thinking of taking turkey tail, especially during treatment, talk to your doctor first, as it may interact with medicines. In both the UK and the EU it's classed as a novel food: it has no authorisation for sale as a food or supplement, because there's no record of people eating it in Europe before 1997. That's a legal status, not evidence that the mushroom is harmful.

Old brackets often turn green as algae settle on them, and several moths and fungus gnats raise their larvae inside the flesh.