Patersonia lanata
Patersonia lanata, commonly known as woolly patersonia, is a species of flowering plant in the family Iridaceae and is endemic to the south of Western Australia. It is a tufted perennial herb with sword-shaped leaves and blue-violet flowers.
Description
Patersonia lanata is a tufted perennial herb with sword-shaped leaves long, wide and is glabrous apart from woolly hairs near the edges of the leaf base. The flowering scape is long and the sheaths enclosing the flowers are triangular, long and dark brown. The petal-like sepals are bluish violet, broadly elliptic, long and wide and the stamens filaments are long joined for most of their length. Flowering occurs from July to November and the fruit is an oval capsule about long containing wrinkled seeds about long.Taxonomy
Patersonia lanata was first formally described in 1810 by Robert Brown in his Prodromus Florae Novae Hollandiae et Insulae Van Diemen. The specific epithet means "woolly", referring to the edges of the leaves, the scape, bracts and ovary.In 1986, David Alan Cooke described two forms of Patersonia lanata and the names are accepted by the Australian Plant Census:Patersonia lanata f. calvata D.A.Cooke has glabrous leaf margins and a more or less glabrous scape;Patersonia lanata R.Br. f. lanata D.A.Cooke has leaf margins that have woolly brown hairs near the base and a woolly-brown scape.