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Poriales (and relatives) Gallery

The Bracket fungi - Poriales and related orders - comprise many families. Most are very tough and inedible, although a few are considered good to eat when they are immature.

These tough, often leathery growths mainly appear on dead trees and occasionally on living trees; just a few species grow on soil. Many take the form of brackets projecting horizontally from the host wood.

Most polypores are perennial and very hard, but a small minority are soft fleshy annuals.
Only a small minority of fungi in this group are edible, and then only when the fruit bodies are very young. In the past some bracket fungi have been used for other purposes, however, including as a slow-burning fuel for fires and as raw materials in dye-making.

Beef-steak fungus
Fistulina
hepaticus

There are some 200 or so European fungi in the order Poriales, with a further 12 Ganodermatales and a single species from the Fistulinales. Fungi from each of these orders are included in this section of the web site.

There is a lot more information about this species and other members of the order Poriales and related bracket fungi on the First Nature CD-ROM Guide to Fungi...

Using much larger, high-quality pictures (because of the extra storage space available and the much higher speed of access to large picture files on CD), the guide shows hundreds of beautiful fungi at various stages of development; and we have also photographed several specimens to show the colour and form variations that can occur.

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