Carmichaelia
Credits
Article from Bean's Trees and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles
Recommended citation
'Carmichaelia' from the website Trees and Shrubs Online (treesandshrubsonline.
Family
- Fabaceae
Editorial Note
This genus was formerly treated as a complex consisting of four closely related taxa: Carmichaelia, Notospartium (three species), Chordospartium (two species), and the monospecific Corallospartium. While Carmichaelia s.s. was separable from the other three genera on the basis of its unilocular anthers, generic distinctions within the complex otherwise depended on poorly defined characters such as growth habit and fruit shape, a state of affairs that was never really found satisfactory. Heenan (1998) found that Carmichaelia s.s. was paraphyletic, but that the larger complex did in fact represent a clearly defined monophyletic clade.
Expanded to accommodate all four genera, Carmichaelia as currently circumscribed consists of 24 accepted species (POWO 2025), of which 23 are endemic to New Zealand. Despite its aggregation from several constituent taxa, no support was found for any infrageneric classification within this enlarged Carmichaelia, at least on Heenan’s examination of anatomical and morphological characters, which are broadly distributed throughout the genus without showing clear patterns. For a key to the species see Heenan (1998).
The text below is adapted from Bean (1976, 1976), who discussed three of the four original genera.
A genus of shrubs, of which all but one (found on Lord Howe Island) are natives of New Zealand. One of the most distinctive features of the genus is the very frequently flattened branches; another is the nearly always leafless condition of the shrubs at maturity; still another is the curious way in which the central part of the pod carrying the seeds falls out when quite ripe, leaving a sort of ring or empty framework. The carmichaelias make no great display of colour but they are pretty and very profuse in flower, and usually charmingly fragrant. The part played in the economy of most plants by leaves is, in this genus, largely performed by the green, flattened stems – not an uncommon occurrence in the broom family. C. petriei and C. enysii are apparently quite hardy; the other species described, with the exception of C. grandiflora, may need a sheltered spot close to a wall facing south or south-west.
