Nature · Fungi

Giant puffball

Fruits July–October · usually 10–50 cm across

Calvatia gigantea — Agaricaceae (a fungus, not a plant)

The giant puffball is the white football in the meadow: a smooth, stalkless, gill-less ball that can reach the size of a beach ball and produce trillions of spores. It is a fungus, not a plant — it has no chlorophyll and lives as a hidden network of threads in the soil, the ball being only its fruiting body. Unlike almost anything else its size it is unmistakable, but only while it is pure white throughout; once the flesh yellows it is spent, and small white puffballs can be confused with deadly things.

How to spot them

▸A large smooth white ball sitting on grass with no stalk, no gills and no cap
▸Kid-leather texture; often football-sized, sometimes far bigger
▸Cut in half, the flesh is pure white and uniform like a marshmallow, with no internal structure
▸Ageing specimens go yellow then olive-brown and split, releasing brown spore dust
▸Grassy places: meadows, verges, hedge bottoms, woodland edges and rank vegetation, July to October

How to know it

A stalkless, gill-less white ball in a meadow, often the size of a football and sometimes far larger

Giant puffball.

A single one can release trillions of spores through tears in its leathery skin

Giant puffball, according to the Wildlife Trusts.

It is edible only while the flesh inside is pure, uniform white; once yellow it is finished

Giant puffball — traditionally sliced and fried like a steak.

A small white ball of this kind must be cut top to bottom, in case it is the egg stage of a lethal species

Giant puffball; an Amanita egg shows the outline of a mushroom inside, a puffball shows uniform flesh.

Its dried spore mass was used as a wound dressing and a styptic, and smoked to calm bees

Giant puffball.

It has no gills or pores at all: the spores are made inside the ball, in a tissue called the gleba

Giant puffball — a gasteroid or 'stomach' fungus.

Quick-fire facts

•A fungus, not a plant: no chlorophyll, cell walls of chitin, and closer to animals than to plants on the tree of life
•The Wildlife Trusts note that a single giant puffball can produce trillions of spores, escaping through tears in the leathery skin
•Commonly around the size of a football; exceptional specimens exceed 80 cm across and several kilograms
•Spores form inside the ball, in the gleba — it has no gills, pores or stem
•Edible and good while the flesh is pure white and firm; once it yellows or browns it is inedible
•Small white puffballs must be sliced vertically: if the cross-section shows the silhouette of a cap, gills and stem, it is the 'egg' of an Amanita and may be lethal
•The dried spore mass was used to staunch bleeding and to smoke bees out of hives
•Saprotrophic, living on dead organic matter in grassland soil, so it appears in meadows and on verges rather than on trees
•Placed in the Agaricaceae, the same family as the field mushroom, despite looking nothing like one

Drill it — 7 cards

1 / 7new card

Sources

The Wildlife Trusts — Giant puffball
The Wildlife Trusts — Common puffball