Likeable Lomatia lost its lucid name

Time for, like, an Australian native plant, a Lomatia. Albeit with leaves like an exotic tree, the ash, Fraxinus. I chanced upon it back in April, huddled in a garden bed up above The Terrace in Melbourne Gardens, not far from Ornamental Lake.

In full bloom it was easy to spot. A cluster of white grevillea-like flowers in an rather open, bottle-brush-like arrangement. (Not quite a show-offy as the better known Ivory Curl, Buckinghamia celsissima, also in the family Proteaceae and in flower closer to the lake - I'll pop a picture in at the end of this post).

Confusingly, it is sometimes called Silky Oak, as is Grevillea robusta. Or to clear up this confusion but make the common name hardly commonly uttered, called Lomatia Silky Oak. Or less helpfully, from my experience, the Black-leaved Silky Oak.

It grows in mountain rainforest, near the coast of far north-eastern Queensland. There are eight more species of Lomatia in Australia, all on the east coast extending down to Victoria and Tasmania. The other three species in the genus are in South America. Most of them have white flowers. 

If we look deep into the flower we find usually three yellow 'glands', each one with two bumps.  The anther, producing the pollen, is held in a spoon-like tip to the white petal-like strips (tepals), peeling back from the extended female part tipped by a receptive stigma (the clothes-brush-like tip).

If there had been fruits, the papery seeds would have been separated by a distinctive yellow powder.

It's a good species to grow in Melbourne Gardens, not only to admire the architecture of the flowers and leaves, but because it reflects a little of Australia's botanical history.

The plant was first collected for science, at Rockhampton Bay, by John Dallachy, second Superintendent of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens, from 1849-1857, and then botanical collector for his successor, Ferdinand von Mueller (Director of these Gardens 1857 to 1873). Mueller described and named the species, as Lomatia fraxinifolia, but it was formally named and described by George Bentham in his Flora Australiensis, in 1870.

Unfortunately, that name is now considered 'illegitimate' because it had already been used for a fossil plant a few years earlier. To resolve that little nomenclatural problem, in the species was recently (2017) given a new name, Lomatia milnerae, by Peter Olde. That name recognises the contributions of Melita Milner to our understanding of this genus but isn't quite as helpful in recognising the species. You'll just have to remember that the leaf is, like, an ash.

Before we finish, a picture of that rather showy Ivory Curl, another Proteaceaous plant collected from Rockhampton Bay by Dallachy. This time Mueller described it formally himself (in 1868) and the name, Buckinghamia celsissima stuck!