Melaleuca styphelioides
species of plant
Melaleuca styphelioides, known as the prickly-leaved paperbark or prickly paperbark, is a plant native to eastern Australia. It is a tree with spongy bark, prickly leaves and spikes of creamy-white flowers.
Description
It is a small to medium-sized tree up to 20 m (70 ft) high with a dense, rounded canopy and drooping branchlets. The spongy bark is white or light brown and peels off in large strips. The leaves are sessile, 7–15 mm (0.3–0.6 in) long and 2.5–6 mm (0.1–0.2 in) wide. They are slightly twisted, have sharply-pointed tips, are arranged alternately on the branchlets and have between 15 and 30 veins.
Flowers appear in summer in cream or white cylindrical "bottlebrush" spikes which are 2 to 5 cm (0.8 to 2 in) long and 1 to 2 cm (0.4 to 0.8 in) in diameter. Often new growth appears at the end of the spikes. Following flowering, grey-brown, woody capsules appear in clusters along the branchlets. These are ovoid, stalkless and 3 to 4 mm (0.1 to 0.2 in) in diameter
Taxonomy
The species was first formally described in 1797 by botanist James Edward Smith in Transactions of the Linnean Society of London from plant material collected by David Burton near Port Jackson.
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This entry incorporates text from “Melaleuca styphelioides” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.