Pimelea lehmanniana


Pimelea lehmanniana is a species of flowering plant in the family Thymelaeaceae and is endemic to the southwest of Western Australia. It is a shrub with narrowly egg-shaped leaves and clusters of white to pale yellow flowers surrounded by 4 or 6, pale yellowish-green involucral bracts.

Description

Pimelea lehmanniana is an erect shrub that typically grows to a height of and has a single stem at ground level. The leaves are narrowly egg-shaped, sometimes with the narrower end towards the base, long and wide on a petiole long. The flowers are white to pale yellow and arranged in clusters on a peduncle long. There are 4 or 6 pale yellowish green, sometimes reddish, egg-shaped to broadly egg-shaped involucral bracts long and wide around the flower clusters, each flower on a hairy pedicel long. The floral tube is long, the sepals long, and the stamens are much longer than the sepals. Flowering occurs from August to November.

Taxonomy

Pimelea lehmanniana was first formally described in 1845 by Carl Meissner in 1845 in Lehmann's Plantae Preissianae. The specific epithet honours Johann Georg Christian Lehmann.
In 1988, Barbara Lynette Rye described two subspecies of P. lehmanniana in the journal Nuytsia, and the names are accepted by the Australian Plant Census:Pimelea lehmanniana Meisn. subsp. lehmanniana has a circumscissile floral tube, the ovary-part hairy.Pimelea lehmanniana subsp. nervosa Rye has a floral tube that is not circumscissile, and the ovary-part of the floral tube is glabrous.

Distribution and habitat

Subspecies lehmanniana grows on rocky hillsides or ridges from Lake Muir to East Mount Barren in the Avon Wheatbelt, Esperance Plains, Jarrah Forest and Mallee bioregions of south-western Western Australia, and subsp. nervosa grows in jarrah and marri woodland on the Darling Range and nearby hilly areas between Gooseberry Hill, Yelverton, Walpole and Mount Barker in separate parts of the Jarrah Forest and Swan Coastal Plain bioregions.

Conservation status

Both subspecies of P. lehmanniana are listed as "not threatened" by the Government of Western Australia Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions.