Scentless rose-coloured flowers and wood

The flowers of  Synoum glandulosum are small and rather simple in structure. There are four pink-blushed petals, and eight apparently pollen-bearing anthers fused onto the inside of cup-like tube around a receptive female disk.

Outside the petals, at the top of the flower stalk, are these rough-textured pink 'sepals'.

The flowers are sometimes described as bisexual, and other times as either male or female but with well developed other-sex parts so that they may look bisexual. I'm not here to judge.

The leaves are divided into leaflets, like those of the more familiar Red Cedar, Toona ciliata, but there are fewer subdivisions - about five to eleven, compared to eight to twenty. Each leaf also ends in a single leaflet, which we call imparipinnate. 

If that leaflet is missing, as it is in Red Cedar, we call the leaf paripinnate. The widely planted White Cedar, Melia azedarach, has leaves further divided leaves and, in case you are wondering, imparipinnate.

The Scentless Rosewood has flowers and timber without a strong perfume. As I mentioned in a previous post, many trees and timbers are associated with the name rosewood, although it was first applied to trees from the pea family. Synoum glandulosum is sometimes called the Bastard Rosewood, presumably because it's not from the family Fabaceae. 

A close relative of both the Scentless Rosewood (and Red Cedar) - in the same family, Meliaceae -  the Dysoxylum fraserianum, is more positively called the Australian Rosewood. Indeed anything with a dark-coloured, high quality timber may be given that general name. In this case, the wood of the Scentless Rosewood is used at least locally for building and joinery.

Scentless Rosewood grows in rainforests on the east cost of Australia, from southern New South Wales to northern Queensland. The northern populations, with five rather than four petals and longer clusters of flowers, are treated as a separate subspecies. 

Throughout the range, the leaves are more obvious than the flowers. But even in bud, the colour of the impending blooms will attract your attention, as it did mine in the Gondwana Garden at Cranbourne.