Home / Violet & amethyst agarics / TM0046
Violet agarics scattered on a hillside
Cortinarius or Laccaria Genus
Angles captured. Twelve frames: several fine low profiles of one large fruitbody, two clean gill views, and wide shots showing many caps scattered across the slope with a hand for scale.
Morphology
The largest of the six populations — a dozen or more fruitbodies visible across one hillside. Mature cap 5–7 cm, expanding to plane with a low umbo, pale silvery-lilac with a warmer buff centre. Gills violet-grey, close, thin, adnexed. Stipe 6–8 cm, white-lilac, fibrillose.
Habitat & substrate
Oak litter on a slope beneath Rhododendron and wintergreen, near a fallen log. Widely gregarious rather than clustered.
Lookalikes & what rules them out
Two genera stay in play. Laccaria amethystina and L. ochropurpurea have thick, widely spaced, waxy gills; Cortinarius has thinner, closer gills and a rusty spore print. Frames #4233, #4234 and #4243 show gills that are close and thin, with a distinctly pinkish-brown cast suggesting a rusty deposit — which points to Cortinarius.
To confirm this identification
One spore print settles the whole group. Rusty brown = Cortinarius, white = Laccaria. Because these six populations are almost certainly one species, a single print resolves all of them at once.
Notes
The scale here is the point: this many fruitbodies of one species across a single slope indicates one large, well-established mycelium.
Found at Leominster State Forest, Leominster, MA on Thursday, 6 August 2026 at 11:06. See the full walk for that day's weather and everything else recorded.
Others in this group
Violet cortCortinarius sp. · Jul 31Moderate–high
Violet agarics on a red eroded bankCortinarius or Laccaria · Aug 6Moderate
Violet agaric in pine litterCortinarius or Laccaria · Aug 6Moderate
Violet agaric, collected and examinedCortinarius or Laccaria · Aug 6Moderate
Violet agaric beside a mossy logCortinarius or Laccaria · Aug 6Moderate
Violet agarics along a fallen logCortinarius or Laccaria · Aug 6Moderate
Violet agarics on a mossy decaying logCortinarius or Laccaria · Aug 8Moderate
Large violet agaric by a fallen logCortinarius or Laccaria · Aug 8Moderate