Yew Club

Appearance

Fruiting body:
0.3-0.6cm wide at tip, 0.1-0.2cm wide at base, 0.5-3cm high, clavate [club-shaped] when young, becoming obconic or trumpet-shaped with wide, cup-like apex; white when fresh, becoming "yellowish white" on drying and finally strong "orange yellow" ("ochraceous-orange"); smooth, (Dodd), 0.8-3cm high, mostly 1.4-1.8cm high, stemmed with an elongate obconic truncate head, 0.4-0.9cm wide at the sterile, flat, or slightly concave top; white becoming ochraceous when old and even orange upward, paler in lower part; "margin of the head thin, upturned or expanded, even deflexed and almost involute at times, wavy or lobed, or with incipient pyxidate branching"; hymenium covering the sides of the head, smooth or becoming vaguely longitudinally rugulose [wrinkled] especially when dry, (Corner), translucent (Doty)
Flesh:
white (Dodd), waxy, very soft, hygrophanous, (Corner)
Stem:
basal mat effuse [spread out flat], strigose, white, (Dodd), stem 0.05-0.1cm wide, solid, cylindric, slightly dilating into the head; white pruinose, with scattered white hairs at the base, (Corner)

Naming

Clavaria taxophila (Thom) Lloyd
Craterellus taxophilus Thom.
Polyporus spumeus Sowerby: Fr.
Sarcodontia spumea (Sowerby)

Habitat

gregarious, usually single, occasionally paired, on leaf duff usually under conifers, often Taxus (yew), "appears to lack the lignicolous habit, but the fruit bodies are attached to twigs and needles in the duff on the ground", also on hardwood leaves though under Taxus, or on bare ground, (Dodd), single or 2-3 together, or subcespitose, on moist, very rotten leaves and twigs of hardwood trees and conifers under prostrate branches of Taxus brevifolia (Pacific Yew) and Pseudotsuga menziesii (Douglas-fir), (Corner), mostly growing erect from small bits of charred wood, needles, and small twigs and among mosses under heavy cover of small Douglas-firs in dense coniferous woods, October, (Doty), fall to winter (Buczacki)