This Grewia grew nearby

There are about 15 or so species of Grewia native to Australia, with Ludwig Leichardt famously describing a drink made from boiling the fruits of Grewia polygama as being the best he had tried on his expedition across northern Australia.

This one though is a southern African species, Grewia occidentalis, the one most commonly grown in at least Melbourne gardens. We have half a dozen in Melbourne Gardens, with one specimen of a Chinese species, Grewia hirsuta. My photographs are from a front garden in Glen Iris.

In our Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria database we give Grewia occidentalis the common name Wild Bottlebrush, which is a little confusing in Australia where bottlebrushes are species of the local Callistemon. And these plants look nothing like those. 

More often, this species is called Crossberry - the berries, which I haven't illustrated here, have four lobes, like a cross.

As for the botanical name, the genus honours a seventeenth century English doctor, Nehemiah Grew (1641-1712), and the species name means from the west - of the Cape presumably. In addition to South Africa, it grows naturally in Zimbabwe and Mozambique. 

The leaves remind me of Hibiscus insularis, the Phillip Island Hibiscus, from an island just south of Norfolk Island, off Australia. 

The flowers though are much smaller but you can still pick up the distinctive arrangement of stamens (anther-bearing parts) clustering around the receptive style. All typical of the family Malvaceae, in which both Hibiscus and Grewia now reside. 

The fruits are eaten by many local birds and other animals in southern Africa, and when dried and added to milk, by humans. They also have medicinal uses in South Africa.

The genus Grewia has something like 320 species today, a lot more than the 100 to 150 that used to be included a few years ago. It's family at that time was Tiliaceae (the Lime Tree family), and that too has expanded and become part of a much larger Malvaceae. 

So this species is just one of many, but a pretty little one. Described as a scrambling shrub or small tree in South Africa, this is pretty much the way it looks in Melbourne Gardens. However it can be trained into a neat hedge, as in this suburban front yard.