Plants of South Eastern New South Wales
Pittosporum bicolor
Common name
Banyalla
Family
Pittosporaceae
Where found
Forest, shrubland, heath, and moist gullies. Ranges and tablelands south of the Kings Highway. Kosciuszko National Park.
Notes
Tree or shrub to 18 m high. Fruit at first fleshy but becoming dry when ripe. Bark smooth, with horizontal ridges from lenticels. Branchlets densely whitish hairy with 2-armed hairs with long spreading arms (needs a hand lens or a macro app on your phone/tablet to see). Older stems sparsely hairy. Leaves alternating up the stems, or rarely in whorls of 3-5, 2–9 cm long, 4–18 mm wide; upper surface dull dark green, sparsely hairy, becoming hairless, lower surface usually densely hairy with appressed grey or white hairs, rarely becoming hairless, margins entire and strongly curved down, tips almost pointed to blunt. Flowers bisexual but functionally unisexual with male and female flowers on diferent plants. Flowers fragrant, tubular, with 5 'petals', yellow internally, whitish with reddish or purple-maroon veins and/or markings externally, each 'petal' 8–13 mm long, curved back at the tips. Sepals usually maroon-tinged, finally turned back. Male flowers in clusters of 1-4 flowers, female flowers single or paired. Flowers mainly Aug.–Dec. Fruit yellowish, turning grey-black when ripe, round or almost round, hairy, 5–13 mm long, opening by 2 valves. Seeds few to many, red, sticking together in a mass.
Occasionally hybridises with Pittosporum undulatum in the Bega district and in Vic. Hybrid plants tend to have foliage with persistent hairs on the lower surface like that of Pittosporum bicolor, flowers of Pittosporum undulatum, and fruits with orange seeds.
PlantNET description: http://plantnet.rbgsyd.nsw.gov.au/cgi-bin/NSWfl.pl?page=nswfl&lvl=sp&name=Pittosporum~bicolor (accessed 1 February, 2021)
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