Senna magnifolia
Senna magnifolia is a species of flowering plant in the family Fabaceae and is endemic to northern Australia. It is an erect, spreading or straggling, mostly glabrous shrub with pinnate leaves with four to six pairs of broadly oblong to round leaflets, and yellow flowers arranged in groups of twenty to sixty, with seven fertile stamens in each flower.
Description
Senna magnifolia is an erect, spreading or straggling shrub that typically grows to a height of up to. The leaves are up to long on a petiole long, with four to six pairs of broadly oblong to round leaflets long and wide, spaced apart. The flowers are yellow and arranged in dense groups of twenty to sixty in leaf axils on a peduncle long, each flower on a pedicel long. The petals are of unequal lengths, long and there are seven fertile stamens and three staminodes in each flower, two anthers long and the other five long. Flowering occurs from May to July and the fruit is a flat pod long and about wide.
Taxonomy
This species was first formally described in 1859 by Ferdinand von Mueller, who gave it the name Cassia magnifolia in Fragmenta Phytographiae Australiae, from specimens he collected near the Gilbert River at an altitude of. In 1990, Barbara Rae Randell transferred the species to Senna as Senna magnifolia in the Journal of the Adelaide Botanic Gardens. The specific epithet means "large-leaved".
Distribution and habitat
Senna magnifolia grows on stony hillsides, limestone outcrops and quartzite hills in the Central Kimberley, Dampierland, Great Sandy Desert, Ord Victoria Plain and Victoria Bonaparte bioregions of northern Western Australia, the Northern Territory and northern Queensland.