Adenanthos eyrei
| Adenanthos eyrei | |
|---|---|
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Plantae |
| (unranked): | Angiosperms |
| (unranked): | Eudicots |
| Order: | Proteales |
| Family: | Proteaceae |
| Genus: | Adenanthos |
| Species: | A. eyrei |
| Binomial name | |
|
Adenanthos eyrei E.C.Nelson |
|
Adenanthos eyrei is a species of shrub in the family Proteaceae. Restricted to a single cliff-top dune system on the remote south coast of Western Australia, it is listed as rare and endangered. It was discovered by E. Charles Nelson in 1973, and formally described and named in 1978.
Adenanthos eyrei grows as an erect shrub up to a metre tall, without a lignotuber, and with warty bark on older stems. Leaves are about 15 mm long, and usually segmented into three lobes, each up to 10 mm long and around 3 mm wide. As with A. cuneata, young leaves are bright red. The flower is dark crimson, with a 25 mm long perianth and a 35 mm style. Reports of flowering time vary: some say that it flowers only in October, others that it flowers throughout the year.
The first herbarium collection of A. eyrei was made in October 1973, when Ernest Charles Nelson visited the south coast to collect specimens for a taxonomic revision of Adenanthos. Nelson was stimulated to make that revision from an interest in the problem of disjunct plant distributions in southern Australia, and therefore made collections at several locations, including three cliff-top dune systems of siliceous sand, isolated from each other by the calcareous soils of the Nullarbor Plain. A. eyrei was found only on the sand patch at Toolinna Cove, though initially Nelson did not rule out the possibility of it occurring also on the sand patches at Twilight Cove and Point Culver.
Four years later Nelson published a comprehensive taxonomic revision of Adenanthos, formally publishing this species and naming it Adenanthos eyrei in honour of Edward John Eyre, the first explorer to visit the area, who is thought to have passed through the Toolinna sandpatch around 1 May 1840.
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