Dense rounded or slender shrub or rarely small tree to 5 m high, usually resinous on young shoots, buds and adaxial surface of leaf. Young branchlets angular, densely hairy with minute appressed hairs, indumentum mostly obscured by resin. Leaves narrowly elliptic to elliptic, oblong elliptic, narrowly obovate to obovate, 20–90 mm long, 5–30 mm wide; apex rounded, obtuse, acute or rarely retuse to emarginate; abaxial surface densely hairy with appressed minute hairs, usually covered with resin. Flowers pedicellate; males axillary, solitary or in shortly pedunculate racemose clusters of up to 5 flowers; females axillary or terminal on short axillary branchlets, solitary or rarely in shortly pedunculate lax clusters of up to 3 flowers; pedicels 3–10 mm long (♂), 5–20 mm long (♀), puberulous (usually concealed by resinous covering). Male flowers: receptacle c. 2 mm across, glabrous or hairy; stamens 30–70. Female flowers: calyx lobes oblong or suborbicular, 2.2–3 mm long; ovary glabrous, thickly resinous, 3-locular; stigma calyptriform. Fruit globose, 6–8 mm long, glabrous or rarely with scattered stellate hairs, resinous; persistent calyx lobes c. one third of fruit length.
Grows in heathland and shrubland communities in sandy soils over limestone or rarely on sandy clay soils over granite. Once recorded on lower slopes in Jarrah/Marri forest on sandy loam over laterite. In eastern Australia it occurs in subcoastal and inland areas from Ingham, NE Qld, S to the south coast of N.S.W., Flinders Is., eastern Tas., and single collections from Boston Point, Eyre Peninsula, S.A., and Sorrento, Vic. In inland areas it is recorded as growing mostly in mallee or Eucalyptus woodland communities, in skeletal sandy loams or red earths, in gullies, on ridges, rocky slopes and hilltops. In subcoastal areas it is recorded as growing in mostly Eucalyptus dominated open forests in gullies, along river banks and on gentle slopes.
Home