Phylica nigrita Sond.

A much branched shrub, about 40 cm high, with wiry branches. Branchlets slender, rather thinly clothed with grey pubescence. Leaves 5-8 mm long: lamina erect-spreading, linear or lanceolate-linear, semiterete, acute or obtuse, rounded at base, with closely revolute margins covering the lower surface; upper surface smooth or more or less rough with closely set or scattered fine tubercles, at first scantily pubescent: petiole about 1 mm long. Capitula 7-10 mm wide, hemisphaeric, surrounded at base by foliaceous bracts of the outer flowers. Bracts of the inner flowers 3 mm long, linear, widened upwards into a cuneate apex, densely covered on the dorsal surface with long, white, silky hairs. Bracteoles 2, about 2-5 mm long, setaceous, similarly villous. Flowers 2.5-3.5 mm long on a hirsute stipe: calyx-tube 1.5 mm deep, cyathiform, clothed with coarse, very caducous hairs: sepals 1-1.25 mm long, ovate-lanceolate, acute, densely covered on the dorsal surface with white, woolly hairs, angular-convex on the inner surface. Petals 0.5 mm long, inserted half way up the tube: lamina galeate, laterally compressed, elliptic or oblong as viewed from above, or linear, concave and incurved, obtuse, the anterior edge below the level of the top of the acicular, slightly longer claw. Anthers 1-celled. Ovary very narrowly obconic, clothed with coarse, very caducous hairs. Stigma subsessile, broad, flat-topped.