Amanita violettae

Amanita violettae has a 70 - 100 mm wide cap that is pallid at first becoming more yellow-olivaceous with maturity; it margin is markedly striate, with striations occupying one quarter to one third of the cap radius.

The white gills are free, close, and sometimes have a pale orangish tint at maturity; short gills are truncate.

The 150 - 200 ´ 20^± mm stem lacks an annulus, is often covered for much of its length by greyish to brownish fibrils, and bears a large thick white saccate volva at its base.

The spores measure (8.4-) 9.2 - 13.0 (-14.2) x (7.7-) 8.2 - 11.2 (-13.5) µm and are globose to subglobose to broadly ellipsoid (infrequently ellipsoid) and inamyloid.  Clamps infrequent at bases of basidia.

It probably occurs in mixed hardwood - hemlock (Tsuga) forest and, hence, is probably associated with birch and hemlock.

Amanita violettae is known to occur in the northeastern United States, possibly as far south as Connecticut.  It probably also occurs in southeastern Canada.

Amanita violettae is among the largest species of section Vaginatae that—comparable in many ways to A. pachycolea Stuntz in Thiers & Ammirati of the northwestern part of the contiguous 48 states of the U.S.A. and southwestern Canada and to the European species A. pachyvolvata (Bon) Krieglst. and A. magnivolvata Aalto.

The species is named for Violetta Susan White.  She made what became the type collection and communicated it with a watercolor painting to C. H. Peck who described it as Amanita vaginata var. crassivolvata in a paper otherwise written by White.—R. E. Tulloss

The editors of this site owe a great debt to Dr. Cornelis Bas whose famous cigar box files of Amanita nomenclatural information gathered over three or more decades were made available to RET for computerization and make up the lion's share of the nomenclatural information presented on this site.