Weeping widowLacrymaria lacrymabunda

The weeping widow (Lacrymaria lacrymabunda) is a brown mushroom of grassy places, roadside verges and parks. Its name comes from the Latin lacryma, a tear: in damp weather, droplets of liquid form along the gill edges, turn black with spores and leave dark spots as they dry. The cap is covered in radiating fibres, a ragged fringe of veil hangs from its edge, and the spore print is black. First Nature notes that it often appears beside gravestones in churchyards. You may also see it listed as Lacrymaria velutina or Psathyrella velutina.

How do you identify a weeping widow? The cap is 3 to 10 cm across, occasionally 12 cm, bell-shaped or hemispherical at first with an inrolled margin, then convex to almost flat, usually with a low, broad bump in the centre. It's dry and densely fibrous or woolly, tawny, ochre or yellow-brown, darker in the centre. Pale, ragged scraps of veil hang from the edge, often blackened by spores. The gills are attached and crowded, pale yellow-brown at first, then dark brown, mottled and almost black, with white edges. On young caps a cobweb-like veil covers the gills. The stem is 5 to 12 cm tall and 0.5 to 1.5 cm thick, pale at the top and browner below, fibrous, hollow and brittle. Near the top the veil leaves a ring zone that turns black with spores, as if someone had drawn round the stem with a marker. The spore print is black or blackish brown.

Where does it grow? On soil in grass: lawns and clearings, parks and gardens, verges and path edges, often near dead trees, roots or old bonfire sites. It grows singly, in groups or in small clusters. It fruits from early summer to late autumn, most often in early and mid-autumn.

Is the weeping widow edible? We treat it as inedible. Sources disagree: some guides list it as edible, others call it bitter, and some people have had stomach upsets after eating it. It also turns into a black, soggy mess in the pan. We found no evidence that it contains psilocybin, and it isn't on lists of psilocybin mushrooms, so it isn't regarded as a magic mushroom. The real danger is the opposite: deadly brown mushrooms look like it.

What can you mistake it for? The most dangerous mix-up is with webcaps, the deadly webcap and the fool's webcap. They also have a tawny, fibrous cap with a bump and a cobweb veil, but their gills and spore print are rusty brown, never black, and they don't weep black droplets. Their poison attacks the kidneys, and the first signs usually take 2 to 3 days, sometimes up to two weeks, to appear. The funeral bell has a brown spore print and grows on wood, including wood buried under a lawn. It contains the same toxins as the death cap, and the first symptoms usually appear 6 to 24 hours after eating, followed by a deceptive improvement. The deadly fibrecap and other fibrecaps have clay-brown spores, no veil fringe and no droplets. The poisonpie also 'weeps' droplets on its gills, so droplets alone prove nothing, but its cap is smooth, pale and sticky and its spore print is reddish brown. So the key check is a spore print (take it from a mature cap): black for the weeping widow. If someone may have eaten an unknown brown mushroom, get help straight away, even if they feel fine: call emergency services on 112 (999 in the UK) or your local poison centre and keep any leftovers. Less dangerous lookalikes: the petticoat mottlegill is smaller, with a smooth bell-shaped cap, and grows on dung, and the field mushroom is white, with pink gills that turn chocolate brown. If a dog eats a wild mushroom, call your vet.