''Grevillea capitellata'' is a species of flowering plant in the family

Proteaceae The Proteaceae form a family of flowering plants predominantly distributed in the Southern Hemisphere. The family comprises 83 genera with about 1,660 known species. Together with the Platanaceae and Nelumbonaceae, they make up the order Pro ...

and is

endemic Endemism is the state of a species being found in a single defined geographic location, such as an island, state, nation, country or other defined zone; organisms that are indigenous to a place are not endemic to it if they are also found elsew ...

to the

Illawarra The Illawarra is a coastal region in the Australian state of New South Wales, nestled between the mountains and the sea. It is situated immediately south of Sydney and north of the South Coast region. It encompasses the two cities of Wollongo ...

region of New South Wales. It is a low, dense mounded or prostrate shrub with narrowly elliptic to oblong leaves, and dull, deep crimson to dark maroon flowers.

Description

''Grevillea capitellata'' is dense, mounded or prostrate shrub that typically grows to a height of up to and often has arching branches. It has narrowly elliptic to oblong leaves long and wide, the lower surface hairy. The flowers are arranged in more or less spherical groups often near ground level. The flowers are dull, deep crimson to dark maroon with a maroon style, the

pistil Gynoecium (; ) is most commonly used as a collective term for the parts of a flower that produce ovules and ultimately develop into the fruit and seeds. The gynoecium is the innermost whorl of a flower; it consists of (one or more) ''pistils'' ...

long and the style strongly curved near its end. Flowering mostly occurs from July to December and the fruit is a glabrous follicle about long.

Taxonomy

''Grevillea capitellata'' was first formally described in 1856 by Carl Meissner in de Candolle's ''

Prodromus Systematis Naturalis Regni Vegetabilis ''Prodromus Systematis Naturalis Regni Vegetabilis'' (1824–1873), also known by its standard botanical abbreviation ''Prodr. (DC.)'', is a 17-volume treatise on botany initiated by Augustin Pyramus de Candolle. De Candolle intended it as a summa ...

'' from specimens collected by Allan Cunningham near

Port Jackson Port Jackson, consisting of the waters of Sydney Harbour, Middle Harbour, North Harbour and the Lane Cove and Parramatta Rivers, is the ria or natural harbour of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. The harbour is an inlet of the Tasman Sea (p ...

. The

specific epithet In taxonomy, binomial nomenclature ("two-term naming system"), also called nomenclature ("two-name naming system") or binary nomenclature, is a formal system of naming species of living things by giving each a name composed of two parts, bot ...

(''capitellata'') means "forming a small head".

Distribution and habitat

This grevillea grows in poorly drained places including in swamp margins and occurs in the far south of the

Sydney Basin The Sydney Basin is an interim Australian bioregion and is both a structural entity and a depositional area, now preserved on the east coast of New South Wales, Australia and with some of its eastern side now subsided beneath the Tasman Sea. ...

and the northern Illawarra region.

Conservation status

Despite its restricted distribution, ''Grevillea capitellata'' has been listed as

Least Concern A least-concern species is a species that has been categorized by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as evaluated as not being a focus of species conservation because the specific species is still plentiful in the wild. T ...

on the

IUCN Red List of Threatened Species The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, also known as the IUCN Red List or Red Data Book, founded in 1964, is the world's most comprehensive inventory of the global conservation status of biologi ...

. There are no known major threats to this species and its population is presumed to be stable.

References

{{Taxonbar, from=Q15578216 capitellata Proteales of Australia Flora of New South Wales Plants described in 1856 Taxa named by Carl Meissner