Artist’s Bracket
It is perennial bracket, distributed worldwide, common on deciduous trees but very rare on conifers. Not edible as it is extremely tough and woody, unless you have teeth like chainsaws!
Scientific Name – Ganoderma applanatum
Common Names:
Artist’s Bracket, Artist’s Conk, Artist’s Fungus, Paled y Peintiwr (CY), Lakownica Spłaszczona (PL), Deres Tapló (HU)
Please note that each and every mushroom you come across may vary in appearance to these photos.
Fruiting Body
Perennial, 10–60 cm across, only 2–8 cm in depth. More or less semi-circular.
Upper surface (skin): is dull grey-brown, knobbly and grooved with a hard wrinkled crust, that is very thin, hardly 1 mm in depth. Sometimes several specimens may grow one above the other. The upper surface may be coloured by spores of adjacent specimens, too.
Pores
Tubes 4–12 mm long. The pores are very small and extremely crowded (4–6 pores/mm2), thus hardly visible to the naked eye. The bracket grows a new spore bearing layer each year, separated by a brown delimitation. The youngest layer is white, darkening when pressed and also as it matures.
Flesh
Very consistent and tough, the colour from ranges from cinnamon to reddish or even dark brown, quite often spotted with white.
Habitat
Growing on dead standing or lying trunks or stumps of hardwoods, very rare on conifers. It is a necrotrophic parasite, causing cubical brown-rot.
Possible Confusion
It is a rather distinctive looking polypore, the only lookalike in Europe is Southern Bracket (Ganoderma adspersum), pictured.
Taste / Smell
Inedible (because of its hard, woody context). Taste bitter, smell somewhat sweet, like many polypores.
Other Facts
It is used in Traditional Chinese Medicine most of all for chronic pharyngitis, its decoction is consumed with honey.
It is not always easy to distinguish between Southern Bracket (Ganoderma adspersum) and Artist’s Bracket (Ganoderma applanatum). However, if you see a non-laccate Ganoderma sp. with distinctive galls mostly on its pore surface, rarely on the sterile upper surface, you can be sure that you have found an Artist’s Bracket, because the Yellow Flat-Footed Fly (Agathomyia wankowiczii) only lays its eggs into Artist’s Brackets. The Yellow Flat-Footed Fly is the only insect in the UK which can cause galls on a fungus.
