''Hakea hastata'' is a shrub 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 southern Western Australia. It is an open, upright shrub with light green leaves, branches covered in dense hairs and white flowers in spring.

Description

''Hakea hastata'' is an erect open shrub typically grows to a height of . It is sparingly branched with branchlets that are densely covered in pale brown hairs. The pale green leaves have a narrowly to broadly ovate shape and a length of and a width of with one to three longitudinal nerves. It blooms from September to October and produces white flowers. The solitary

inflorescence An inflorescence is a group or cluster of flowers arranged on a stem that is composed of a main branch or a complicated arrangement of branches. Morphologically, it is the modified part of the shoot of seed plants where flowers are formed o ...

s contain 18 to 22 flowers with a cream-white coloured

perianth The perianth (perigonium, perigon or perigone in monocots) is the non-reproductive part of the flower, and structure that forms an envelope surrounding the sexual organs, consisting of the calyx (sepals) and the corolla (petals) or tepals when ...

. After flowering woody fruits form that have an obliquely ovate to broadly ovate shape and are in length and wide with an obscure beak. The blackish brown seeds have an obliquely ovate or elliptic shape with a wing down one side.

Taxonomy and naming

''Hakea hastata'' was first formally described by the botanist

Laurence Haegi Laurence is an English and French given name (usually female in French and usually male in English). The English masculine name is a variant of Lawrence and it originates from a French form of the Latin ''Laurentius'', a name meaning "man from ...

in 1999 in the appendix to the '' Flora of Australia'' from specimens collected in 1871 b
Hansjörg Eichler
in the Tuttanning Nature Reserve. 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 ...

is from the

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

word ''hastata'' meaning ''spear-like'' referring to the spear-head shape of the leaves.

Distribution

This hakea is

an area in the Wheatbelt and Great Southern regions of

Western Australia Western Australia (commonly abbreviated as WA) is a state of Australia occupying the western percent of the land area of Australia excluding external territories. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean to the north and west, the Southern Ocean to th ...

from around Pingelly in the north to Albany in the south and has a scattered distribution. The shrub is found on and around hills and grows in sandy, loamy or clay soils that can contain gravel. It is usually part of a heath understorey community in ''

Eucalyptus ''Eucalyptus'' () is a genus of over seven hundred species of flowering trees, shrubs or mallees in the myrtle family, Myrtaceae. Along with several other genera in the tribe Eucalypteae, including '' Corymbia'', they are commonly known as euca ...

'' woodlands.

References

{{Taxonbar, from=Q18079918 hastata Eudicots of Western Australia Plants described in 1999