Plants of South Eastern New South Wales

Maireana decalvans

Seed cases. Photographer Russell Best, Murray Sunset National Park, Vic

Plant. Photographer Russell Best, Murray Sunset National Park, Vic

Line drawing. q. seed case. M Moir, National Herbarium of Victoria, © 2021 Royal Botanic Gardens Board

Common name

Black Cotton Bush

Family

Where found

Often a colonizer of disturbed ground. Woodland, shrubland, grassland, disturbed sites, and floodplains. Western Slopes.

Notes

Shrub or perennial herb to 0.50 m tall. Stems sparsely to moderately hairy. Leaves fleshy, alternating up the stems, 0.5-1.1 cm long, narrow cylindrical, hairless. Flowers small, tubular, with 5 'petals', hairless, or the margins of the 'petals' fringed. Flowers single, but crowded into leafy spikes at the ends of the branchlets. Seed cases pink to white or tinged orange, drying dark brown to black, 6–10 mm in diameter, hairless, tubular, the tube shallowly hemispherical, 2.5–3 mm in diameter, with a single horizontal wing with one radial slit.

PlantNET description:  http://plantnet.rbgsyd.nsw.gov.au/cgi-bin/NSWfl.pl?page=nswfl&lvl=sp&name=Maireana~decalvans (accessed 24 January, 2021)