Agaricus species

The Agaricus genus of fungi provides us with some of the best tasting and prolific mushrooms of Winter. If you can learn how to identify the one bad one, you can be sure of a good feed of traditional white mushrooms.

Agaricus have large, fleshy, white caps and are, essentially, the mushrooms that you buy from your farmer’s market or supermarket.

We have three species of edible Agaricus around Gawler, two of which are described on this website. They are pretty similar and have slight differences but are all edible. There’s the Pavement Mushroom, A. bitorquis and the Button Mushroom. A. bisporus. Then there’s the slightly toxic A. xanthodermus. As long as you learn to broadly identify members of this genus and know what to look out for in a Yellow Stainer (A. xanthodermus), you’ll be right. Each of these have their own page that you can link to from below.

Identifying Agaricus species – a summary

All of the mushrooms linked to by this page have several general features in common. There are slight variations between the species but generally, you will find –

Broad white/brown cap

Cuticle that is easy to peel

Crowded gills that start pinkish and become browner with age

The stem is easily separated from the cap

Thick stem with a fragile ring that is easy to destroy

No volva

Brown spore print