Balaustion grande


Balaustion grande is a species of flowering plant in the family Myrtaceae and is endemic to the south-west of Western Australia. It is a low-growing shrub with oblong or narrowly oblong leaves and usually white or pale pink flowers with 16 to 28 stamens fused in a ring.

Description

Balaustion grande is a low-growing shrub that typically grows to high and wide. Its leaves are oblong or narrowly oblong, often clustered, mostly long and wide and sessile or on a petiole up to long. The flowers are in diameter and borne in up to 6 pairs, each flower on a pedicel long. The floral tube is long and wide and the sepals are egg-shaped and deep maroon, long and wide. The petals are usually white or pale pink, rarely pink, and long with 16 to 28 stamens fused in a ring. Flowering has been recorded from July to October, and the fruit is a capsule long and wide.
This species is distinguished from other species of Balaustion by it stamens that are fused at their bases, and from its pedicels that are much longer than its peduncles.

Taxonomy

This species was first formally described in 1904 by the Ernst Georg Pritzel who gave it the name Baeckea grandis in Engler's journal Botanische Jahrbücher für Systematik, Pflanzengeschichte und Pflanzengeographie in an article by Pritzel and Ludwig Diels entitled Fragmenta Phytographiae Australiae occidentalis. In 2022, Barbara Lynette Rye transferred the species to Balaustion as B. grande in the journal Nuytsia. The specific epithet is from the Latin grandis meaning 'great, large or tall'.

Distribution and habitat

Balaustion grande grows on sand-plains between Bookara near the Greenough River to Wongan Hills in the Avon Wheatbelt, Geraldton Sandplains and Swan Coastal Plain bioregions of south-western Western Australia.

Conservation status

This species of Balaustion is listed as "Priority Three" by the Government of Western Australia Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions meaning that it is poorly known and known from only a few locations but is not under imminent threat.