Summary:
Also listed in Polypores category. Trichaptum laricinum is a polypore with a gill-like purplish "pore" surface. It fruits on dead conifer sapwood. It can be bracket-like or shelf-like, or instead it can grow flat on the wood with the pore surface facing away from the wood. When it is bracket-like or shelf-like, the cap is thin but rigid, tan to gray, hairy, and faintly zoned. The description is derived from Gilbertson(1).

Cap:
bracket-like, or bent outward from flat pore surface forming shelf-like cap, or entirely flat on wood with pore surface exposed, thin but rigid; tan to gray; hirsute [hairy], faintly zoned, [dimensions not given by Gilbertson(1) but www.cegep-sept-iles.qc.ca, accessed January 25, 2010 gave width along substrate as 1-7cm, projection from substrate as 1-4cm and thickness as 0.2-0.4cm]

Flesh:
less than 0.1cm thick, coriaceous [leathery]; pale purplish brown

Gills:
with radiating gill-like structures, sometimes poroid near margin; purplish, in dried specimens brown; gills up to 0.3cm deep in vertical sections

Microscopic spores:
spores 6-7 x 2-2.5 microns, allantoid [curved sausage-shaped], smooth, inamyloid, colorless; basidia 4-spored, 18-20 x 4-5 microns, clavate, with basal clamp; cystidia abundant, 4-6 microns wide and embedded or projecting to 10 microns, fusoid, thick-walled, capitately incrusted; hyphae dimitic, skeletal hyphae of context 3-5 microns wide, "thick-walled, nonseptate, with rare branching", generative hyphae of context 2-4 microns wide, thin-walled to thick-walled, "with clamps, rather inconspicuous in mature specimens"; hyphae of trama similar

Notes:
It has been found in BC, WA, OR, ID, AB, MB, NT, NB, NL, NS, ON, PE, QC, SK, YT, AK, AL, AR, AZ, CA, CO, CT, DE, FL, GA, IA, IL, IN, KY, LA, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, MO, MS, MT, NC, ND, NH, NJ, NM, NV, NY, OH, PA, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, VA, VT, WI, WV, and WY, (Gilbertson).

EDIBILITY

Synonyms and Alternate Names:
Lenzites laricinus P. Karst.