Home / Violet & amethyst agarics / TM0044
Violet agaric, collected and examined
Cortinarius or Laccaria Genus
Angles captured. The most informative of the six. Five in-situ frames, then four with a fruitbody lifted and turned to show the gills and cap face directly.
Morphology
Cap 4–5 cm, lilac-violet fading paler toward the margin, dry and silky. Gills close, thin, and pinkish-brown to dull violet — the colour of a rusty spore deposit settling on a violet gill face. Stipe pale lilac, fibrillose, tapering slightly, base whitish.
Habitat & substrate
Oak leaf litter on level ground among low evergreen groundcover.
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
Picking one up was the right call — the gill colour visible here is the single strongest piece of evidence in the violet group, and it favours Cortinarius.
Found at Leominster State Forest, Leominster, MA on Thursday, 6 August 2026 at 10:59. 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 agarics scattered on a hillsideCortinarius 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