Student finds rare wrinkled peach mushroom

A student has recorded a sighting of a rare mushroom species.

Tom Haddon, 41, a student at the University of Northampton, spotted a wrinkled peach mushroom (Rhodotus palmatus) in woodland at Stanwick Lakes Nature Reserve in October.

Online wildlife logging platform iNaturalist said it was the only recorded sighting of the species in Northamptonshire it received in 2025.

"I didn't expect to find one here at all with them being in lowering numbers," the Environmental Science student said.

He found the mushroom on his final day of fieldwork for his dissertation on the abundance of macrofungi in conservation-managed areas.

"I was approaching this heavily decayed log and I could see the wrinkled peach sat staring at me.

"[It's] a beautiful peach-coloured mushroom and you could see it from metres around.

"I knew which mushroom it was but I was not aware that it was vulnerable to extinction, so it certainly tugged at the heartstrings," he said.

"It's had 1,600 [recorded sightings] across the country, which is an alarmingly small number.

"Should this beautiful mushroom disappear from the English countryside completely, we would see loss of habitat and biodiversity," he added.

Online wildlife logging platform iNaturalist said the mushroom species has declining populations across much of Europe and Tom's entry was one of just "a handful of sightings of this species [ever] logged in Northamptonshire".

The International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List of Threatened Species classifies the wrinkled peach mushroom as a vulnerable species that is in decline due to "fungal pathogens killing its primary host [trees] elm and ash".

The National Biodiversity Network Trust currently holds 1,624 UK sighting records of the wrinkled Peach mushroom.

Mr Haddon said mushrooms were important in nature because they recycled nutrients from decaying plants and put them back into the eco-system.

"Fungi lives under the ground, it's pretty much everywhere [but] we don't see it unless it produces a mushroom.

"It's believed that at least 90% of all flora on the planet, trees, grasses, flowers, require a mutual fungal partner to actually survive.

"[Mushrooms] provide vital eco-system services. Without mushrooms, we wouldn't have had soil, we wouldn't have trees.

"Mushrooms allow for nutrients to be dispersed amongst the habitat, they're ultimately the perfect recyclers."

Follow Northamptonshire news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.