Blue Roundhead

Stropharia caerulea – Other

Grassy forests, forest edges, parks, thickets. Summer, autumn.

Fruiting bodies small to medium-sized. Cap 3-5 (8) cm across, raised-flattened, flattened, with a blunt umbo, blue, fading to greyish-bluish-greenish, white-scaly. Gills grey, soon violet-brown, adnexed. Stem 3-7 (10)x0.5–1.8 cm, with a fragmentary ring, above which it is bluish, white-fibrillose, below greyish-bluish, white-flocculose or fibrous, as if bristling. Flesh bluish, later whitish, with a mushroomy smell, not bitter.

Characteristic features: the similar pale roundhead (S. pseudocyanea) grows in the same places, but its fruiting bodies are only bluish-greenish, faintly fibrous, finely scaly.

Appears singly or in small groups in gloomy, grassy, damp places. Food value unknown.