Plants of South Eastern New South Wales
Solanum celatum
Common name
A nightshade
Family
Solanaceae
Where found
Forest, woodland, and in clearings. Commonly found after fire or disturbance. Wollongong area south to Jervis Bay, and west to near Goulburn.
Notes
Shrub to about 2.5 m high. Prickles sparse on stems, rare on leaf stalks, leaf midveins, individual flower stalks, and calyces, usually absent elsewhere. Fruit fleshy. Branches very densely stellate hairy (needs a hand lens or a macro app on your phone/tablet to see), grey to white. Leaves alternating up the stems, usually 4.6–12.5 cm long, 15–35 mm wide, densely stellate hairy, upper surface grey-green, lower surface yellowish-white, margins entire, or shallowly lobed in juvenile leaves. Flowers bisexual and male, purple, mauve, or pinkish, with orange stamens, 24–40 mm in diameter, with a short tube and 5 shallow lobes, in 4–7-flowered clusters. Fruit pale green to blackish when ripe, globular, 13–16 mm in diameter, base enclosed in the usually non-prickly calyx. Flowering: August to October.
Endangered NSW. Provisions of the NSW Biodiversity Conservation Act 2016 No 63 relating to the protection of protected plants generally also apply to plants that are a threatened species.
NSW Threatened Species profile: http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/threatenedSpeciesApp/profile.aspx?id=10761 (accessed 8 January 2021)
PlantNET description: http://plantnet.rbgsyd.nsw.gov.au/cgi-bin/NSWfl.pl?page=nswfl&lvl=sp&name=Solanum~celatum (accessed 8 January 2021)
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