''Stackhousia monogyna'', commonly known as creamy stackhousia or creamy candles,is a flowering plant in the family

Celastraceae The Celastraceae (staff-vine or bittersweet) are a family of 97 genera and 1,350 species of herbs, vines, shrubs and small trees, belonging to the order Celastrales. The great majority of the genera are tropical, with only ''Celastrus'' (the staf ...

. It is a small multi-stemmed plant with narrow leaves and terminal spikes of white, cream or yellow flowers. It is a widespread species found in all states of Australia but not the Northern Territory.

Description

''Stackhousia monogyna'' is a slender, multi-stemmed, perennial herb to high, covered with soft hairs or smooth on upright or ascending stems. The leaves are dark green, mostly narrow, linear to lance-shaped, up to long, wide and rounded, acute or with a short point at the apex. The

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 ...

consists of numerous white, cream or yellow flowers in a densely-packed cylindrical spike, each flower is tubular with five pointed spreading lobes up to long. Flowering occurs from late winter to early summer and the fruit is a wide oval or ellipsoid shaped

mericarp A schizocarp is a dry fruit that, when mature, splits up into mericarps. There are different definitions: * Any dry fruit composed of multiple carpels that separate. : Under this definition the mericarps can contain one or more seeds (the m ...

, wrinkled to veined and long.

Taxonomy and naming

The species was described in 1861 by

Ferdinand von Mueller Baron Sir Ferdinand Jacob Heinrich von Mueller, (german: Müller; 30 June 1825 – 10 October 1896) was a German-Australian physician, geographer, and most notably, a botanist. He was appointed government botanist for the then colony of Vict ...

as ''Desdemodium acanthocladum''. In 1805 French naturalist

Jacques Labillardière Jacques-Julien Houtou de Labillardière (28 October 1755 – 8 January 1834) was a French biologist noted for his descriptions of the flora of Australia. Labillardière was a member of a voyage in search of the Jean-François de Galaup, comte ...

changed the name to ''Stackhousia monogyna'' and the description was published in ''

Novae Hollandiae Plantarum Specimen ''Novae Hollandiae Plantarum Specimen'' is a two-volume work describing the flora of Australia. Facsimiles of the originals can be found in the onlinBiodiversity Heritage Library (Vol.1)anVol 2) The author was the French botanist Jacques Labillar ...

''.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 ...

(''monogyna'') means "one", probably referring to the one-seeded fruit.

Distribution and habitat

Creamy stackhousia is a common widespread species growing in grassland and dry forest on gravel, clay and granite in all states of Australia but not the Northern Territory.

References

Stackhousia Flora of Queensland Flora of South Australia Flora of Tasmania Flora of Victoria (Australia) Eudicots of Western Australia Flora of New South Wales {{Celastraceae-stub