A Charcoal Burner in the woods
There’s a purple mushroom on the forest floor. No, not purple, lilac. No, not lilac, it’s blue; and it’s pink in the centre.
I’ve seen others with a rainbow of colours including green and yellow tones as well as much deeper purple. They are Charcoal Burners, Russula cyanoxantha. I suspect the name is because the colours look like the flame on burning charcoal.
Here they are in the Handbook of British Fungi by Mordecai Cubitt Cooke published in 1881.
Charcoal Burners are common and edible.
I’ve never eaten one.