fairy mushroom

plural fairy mushrooms

1. Any of various small mushrooms growing on stalks.

   The fairy-mushroom forest of tents had hardly sprung up before the soldiers began to come in to see us.

   1919, Katharine Tynan, The Years of the Shadow, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, page 315

   2 more examples

   The toadstools or poisonous mushrooms are named Bwyd Ellyllon, or Elves'-food. Perhaps, however, it is not the large ugly toadstools that are so named, but those pretty small delicate fungi, with their conical heads, which are named Fairy-mushrooms in Ireland, where they grow so plentifully.

   1850, Thomas Keightley, The Fairy Mythology, London: H.G. Bohn, page 412

   [I]f she wishes to see them at their sport, she has only to make a ring out of a thraneen, and look at them through it, and she will see them in all their bravery with their fox-glove caps and green jerkins, capering to the sound of a bag-pipe, with a lurikeen playing it, and he sitting on a fairy mushroom; but she will never see a stim with that eye again.

   1869, Patrick Kennedy, Evenings in the Duffrey, Dublin: M'Glashan and Gill, page 6