Epacris gnidioides
Epacris gnidioides, commonly known as Budawangs cliff-heath, is a species of flowering plant in the heath family Ericaceae and is endemic to a restricted area of New South Wales. It is a small, creeping shrub with hairy branches, sharply-pointed lance-shaped leaves, and tube-shaped, white flowers. Originally described as Rupicola gnidioides, it was at one time regarded as the only species in the genus Budawangia under the synonym Budawangia gnidioides.
Description
Epacris gnidioides is a creeping, rhizome-forming shrub with branches up to long. Its leaves are lance-shaped, long and wide on a petiole about long. The leaves are thin, concave and covered with long, soft hairs. The flowers are arranged singly in leaf axils on a pedicel long, the sepals long. The petals are white and form a tube long, the lobes long and tapered. Flowering occurs from September to February and the fruit is a capsule about long.Taxonomy
This species was first formally described in 1927 by Victor Samuel Summerhayes who gave it the name Rupicola gnidioides in the Bulletin of Miscellaneous Information based on specimens collected in 1927 by Frederick A. Rodway near the Ettrema River, south west of Nowra in a "cleft in sandstone cliff".In 1992, Ian Telford moved the species to his newly created genus Budawangia as Budawangia gnidioides in the journal Telopea. It was the only species in the genus.
In 2015, Elizabeth Anne Brown transferred the species to Epacris as Epacris gnidioides based on a phylogenetic study which found that Rupicola and Budawangia were embedded within Epacris., sources such as the Australian Plant Census and Plants of the World Online accept the name Epacris gnidioides, regarding Rupicola gnidioides and Budawangia gnidioides as a synonyms.