Plants of South Eastern New South Wales
Epacris gunnii
Common name
A heath
Family
Ericaceae
Where found
Dry forest, heath, grasslands, stream banks, and wet, peaty sites. Kosciuszko National Park, western ACT, tablelands, and ranges.
Notes
Shrub to 1m high. Leaf tips more or less sharp. Old stems dark brown, bare, with raised, crescentric leaf scars. Branchlets rounded to ribbed, brown, hairy. Leaves scattered, evenly spaced, extending well down the branches, 0.2–0.7 cm long, 1.5–6 mm wide, hairless, bases with rounded to pointed lobes, margins sometimes partly translucent, rough, midrib on the lower surface forming a weak keel. Flowers white, 5 mm in diameter, bell-shaped, the tube 1.2–2.5 mm long, shorter than the sepals, with 5 spreading lobes 1.7–2.7 mm long. No hairs on the inside of the flowers. Sepals white or with a red-tinge. Flowers clustered near the tops of the stems and spreading down the stems for 20–30 cm. Flowers most of the year.
The low shrub less than 0.5 m high that occurs in alpine feldmark, treated as Eapcris gunnii in Mark Ballantyne, Catherine M. Pickering, Keith L. McDougall and Genevieve T. Wright: Sustained impacts of a hiking trail on changing Windswept Feldmark vegetation in the Australian Alps Australian Journal of Botany (2014) 62, 263–275, is now regarded as Epacris microphylla in the broad sense as described in Kosciuszko Alpine Flora. However, it is likely to be an as yet unnamed species. (personal communication from Genevieve Wright, April 2018)
Family was Epacridaceae.
All native plants on unleased land in the ACT are protected.
PlantNET description: http://plantnet.rbgsyd.nsw.gov.au/cgi-bin/NSWfl.pl?page=nswfl&lvl=sp&name=Epacris~gunnii (accessed 13 January, 2019)
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