Banksia penicillata

Location & distribution maps

Phylogeny & links to associated information:

Wikipedia links:       Angiosperms > Eudicots > Proteales > Proteaceae > Banksia   penicillata

Other links:     

Plant  information

Common name:                . . .  

Conservation status:  . . .

Etymology:   

• The genus is named after Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820 ), who, in 1770, was the first European to collect specimens of these plants

• The specific epithet (penicillata) is from the Latin word penicillatus, meaning "like an artist's camel-hair brush

Flowers:                  

• The flower buds are green to bluish and are followed by yellow flowers in a cylindrical spike 70–190 mm long with woolly-hairy involucral bracts 10–20 mm long at the base of the spike

• The perianth is 20–26 mm long and the pistil 22–26 mm long and slightly curved

• Flowering occurs from March to June and up to one hundred elliptical follicles 11–15 mm long and surrounded by the remains of the flowers, develop in each spike

Fruit:                         

Leaves:         

• The leaves are arranged in whorls and are 35–120 mm long and 7–40 mm wide on a petiole 5–19 mm long

• The sides of the leaves are serrated or lobed and the lower surface is covered with woolly white hairs

Stem & branches: 

Roots:         

Habit:        

• A shrub that typically grows to a height of 4 m and has smooth bark but does not form a lignotuber

Habitat:   

• Banksia penicillata grows on and near rocky sandstone cliffs in forest and woodland 

Distribution:                  

• Endemic to a restricted area of NSW

• SWA few locations in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney

Additional notes:     

• Taxonomy and naming

  • Banksia conferta was first formally described in 1981 by Alex George in the journal Nuytsia

  • In the same publication he described two varieties, conferta and penicillata

  • In 1996, George raised the variety penicillata to subspecies - B. conferta subsp. penicillata, at the same time creating the autonym B. conferta subsp. conferta. In the same year (1996), Kevin Thiele and Pauline Ladiges raised subspecies penicillata to species status as B. penicillata in Australian Systematic Botany, based on the differences in habit, bark, leaf shape, indumentum and flower colour, and the fact that the two taxa were so far from each other

  • According to their morphological cladistic analysis, B. penicillata was sister taxon to B. paludosa

  • In the same paper, the authors noted that the adult leaves of B. penicillata and B. paludosa have toothed margins, but B. conferta has entire margins

  • The change is accepted by the Australian Plant Census

  • A 2013 molecular study by Marcel Cardillo and colleagues using chloroplast DNA and combining it with earlier results placed B. penicillata as a part of a lineage that gave rise to the three subspecies of B. integrifolia.

Sources of information:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banksia_penicillata (2023)