Wrinkled peachRhodotus palmatus

The wrinkled peach (Rhodotus palmatus) is one of the most beautiful mushrooms in Europe. Its cap is peach-pink to apricot, rubbery and jelly-like, and covered in a network of paler veins like the lines on a palm, which is where the name palmatus, "hand-shaped", comes from. Young ones even "bleed", with orange-red droplets on the stem.

How do you identify a wrinkled peach? The cap is 3 to 8 cm across, occasionally 10 cm, almost spherical at first, then convex with an inrolled margin and finally almost flat. The surface is sticky and rubbery, with a net of veins and pits, though older caps can lose the net and become smooth. The gills are pinkish, paler than the cap, and attached to the stem. The stem is short, 1 to 5 cm, often curved and off-centre because the mushroom grows out sideways from a log and then turns upwards, white to pinkish with white fibres. The spore print is very pale pink to cream, and the taste is bitter.

Where does it grow? On fairly recently dead broadleaved wood: fallen trunks, stumps and logs, mostly of elm, less often ash, horse chestnut and other trees, in shady, damp woods, often by rivers and streams. Look for it from late summer to winter, with most finds in mid to late autumn. Across Europe it's assessed as Vulnerable.

Is the wrinkled peach edible? No: it's bitter and rubbery. We found no reports of poisoning, but its scarcity is reason enough to leave it alone. Photograph it instead and, if you can, record your find.

What can you mistake it for? Velvet shank also grows on dead wood in the cold months and has a sticky orange cap, but the cap is smooth, without a net, the stem is velvety and dark towards the base, it grows in dense tufts and its spore print is white. Oyster mushrooms have grey, brown or cream caps with no net and gills running down the stem. The pink oyster is pink, but it's a cultivated mushroom from shops and grow kits, with thin, fan-shaped caps. The elm oyster is white to buff, dry and smooth. Flame shield (Pluteus aurantiorugosus) also grows on dead elm, but it's flame orange, wrinkled only at the centre, and has free gills.

The wrinkled peach used to be rare, but when Dutch elm disease killed millions of elms from the 1970s, dead elm wood became plentiful and the fungus spread. Now that old elms are scarcer, it's becoming rarer again. Botanists long struggled to place it, moving it from genus to genus until René Maire created the genus Rhodotus just for it in 1926.