Acacia havilandiorum

Acacia havilandiorum, also known as Haviland's wattle or needle wattle, is a shrub of the genus Acacia and the subgenus Plurinerves. It is native to areas in South Australia, New South Wales and Victoria.

Description

The bushy shrub or small typically grows to a height of and has glabrous and terete branchlets. Like most species of Acacia it has phyllodes rather than true leaves. The grey to green, inclined to ascending and straight or slightly incurved, rigid phyllodes are in length and wide and are quite brittle and tend to break easily. It blooms between July and October producing simple inflorescences which occur in group of one to three in the axils and have spherical flower-heads with a diameter of and contain 20 to 30 bright yellow coloured flowers. Following flowering it produces glabrous and firmly papery seed pods which are straight to curved and raised over each seed and slightly constricted between them and have a length of and a width of.

Taxonomy

The species was first described by Joseph Maiden in 1920 as Acacia havilandi, despite the specific epithet honouring both Edwin Haviland and his son, who " specialised in the fertilisation of Australian plants and also worked at taxonomy and other branches of botany" The epithet was changed to a genitive plural to accord with ICN Art. 60.8.

Distribution

The plant has a scattered and discontinuous distribution from as far west as the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia where it is common, to further north in the Flinders Range through to Griffith and Cobar but the range extends as far as Gilgandra in the east. It is only known around Horsham in the north west region of Victoria. In New South Wales the plant is mostly found in the Pilliga Scrub between Gilgandra and Milgee as a part of mallee and box woodland communities.