Acacia nyssophylla


Acacia nyssophylla, commonly known as pin bush, wait a while and spine bush, is a shrub of the genus Acacia and the subgenus Plurinerves that is endemic to a large area of central and south-western and southern Australia.

Description

The intricate prickly shrub typically grows to a height of and has hairless branchlets that are scarred where the phyllodes have detached. Like most species of Acacia it has phyllodes rather than true leaves. The evergreen phyllodes are fixed on yellow stem-projections. The pungent, rigid, dull and glabrous phyllodes are straight to shallowly curved with a length of and about wide and have about 20 obscure veins. It blooms from July to October or as late as November producing simple inflorescences that usually appear in pairs in the axils with spherical to ellipsoidal flower-heads that have a diameter of and contain 12 to 19 golden coloured flowers. The firmly chartaceous seed pods that form after flowering have a linear shape that are a little constricted between each of the seeds and are curved to once-coiled. The glabrous pods have a length of and a width of and have longitudinally veins. The glossy black seeds inside have a lanceolate-oblong or oblong-elliptic shape with a length of with a large orange or yellow coloured aril.

Taxonomy

It was first described by Ferdinand von Mueller in 1863 from a specimen collected by Babbage near Lake Gairdner in South Australia. The specific epithet is taken from the Greek words nysso meaning to pierce and phyllon meaning leaf in reference to the stiff and pointy phyllodes.

Distribution

It is native to an area in the Wheatbelt and Goldfields-Esperance regions of Western Australia, through South Australia to extreme north-western Victoria, and north from South Australia to near Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, to Western New South Wales near Bourke.