Summary: Features include 1) a hygrophanous, dark brown to pale gray brown to ochraceous buff cap with peelable skin and a striate margin, 2) cream to light cinnamon brown to gray brown to dark brown gills sometimes with a violet tint, 3) a brown stem with white fibrils, 4) growth on needles, leaves, mosses, twigs or other herbal debris, and 5) spores that are rhomboid to miter-shaped in face view. The online Species Fungorum, accessed April 18, 2016, gave the current name as Deconica phyllogena (Sacc.) Noordel., Ost. Z. Pilzk. 18: 198 (2009).
Gills: broadly adnate, 27-31 reaching stem, broad, 3-7 subgills between each pair of gills; cream when young, becoming light cinnamon brown to purple-brown; edges white-flocculose, (Breitenbach), first gray brown then dark brown and sometimes with a slightly violet tint, (Hansen)
Stem: 2-4cm x 0.1-0.25cm, cylindric with slightly bulbous base, solid, rigid but snappable; whole surface whitish-fibrillose-scaly on a red-brown to black-brown background, (Breitenbach), thin, brown, covered with white fibrils, (Hansen)
Microscopic spores: spores 5.7-7.5 x 3.5-4.6 x 4.7-5.9 microns, rhomboidal-mitriform in frontal view, elliptic - almond-shaped in side view, smooth, yellow-brown, thick-walled, with a germ pore; basidia 4-spored, 20-25 x 6.5-7.5 microns, clavate, with basal clamp connection; pleurocystidia not seen, cheilocystidia 30-55 x 4.5-8 microns, fusiform-lageniform, some with a colorless vesicular secretion at top; cap cuticle of gelatinized, +/- periclinal hyphae 2-4 microns wide, "with vesicular, irregularly disposed cells below, all with faint yellowish pigmentation", septa with clamp connections, (Breitenbach), spores (5.5)6-9(11.5) x 4-6 x 3.5-4.5 microns, +/- rhomboid in face view, (Hansen), spores 5.5-7 x 4.7-5 x 3.5-4 microns, almost rhombic-lenticular, (Moser)
Notes: It was reported from BC according to Redhead(5) (as P. rhombispora), There are collections from BC and WA at the University of British Columbia. It also occurs in Europe.
EDIBILITY
Habitat and Range
Habitat
usually gregarious, more rarely single "in hardwood and coniferous forests, on rotten wood, mosses, or leaves", (Breitenbach for Europe), on "herbal debris, small fallen twigs, or mosses, often on moist ground", (Hansen for Europe), on dead leaves or needles (Moser for Europe), summer to fall (Buczacki)