Leucopogon

A genus of over 100 species, mainly Australian, but a few in Malaysia and New Zealand. The genus is closely allied to Cyathodes, and the species described here was recently transferred to it by Dr Allan (Fl. N.Z., Vol. 1, pp. 513 and 517), together with the other New Zealand species included in Leucopogon in earlier works. The greater part of the material in the Kew Herbarium under these two genera conforms to the following characters: In Leucopogon the flowers are generally small, in slender, often dense, sometimes interrupted spicate inflorescences, each flower subtended by a bract and having two bracteoles close to the calyx (but towards the base of the pedicel in two species). The corolla-lobes in Leucopogon are conspicuously white-bearded. In Cyathodes the flowers are generally solitary in the axil of foliage leaves; the pedicel is covered with a series of overlapping scale-like “bracts”, increasing in size upward and the uppermost around the base of the calyx. The corolla-lobes in Cyathodes are glabrous or, if hairy, then not conspicuously so.

There are, however, variations which tend to blur these distinctions. It would be too much of a digression to discuss these in detail, since the species mainly concerned are not in cultivation. But it should be remarked that in Leucopogon some species have the inflorescences much reduced, sometimes to a single flower, but the flowers retain the bract and two bracteoles characteristic of the genus. If Leucopogon is to be retained as a genus distinct from Cyathodes, then L. fraseri, described here, would belong to it. But it should be added that the position of Cyathodes colensoi, described in Vol. I, is debatable. It was described by Hooker in Leucopogon and later transferred by him to Cyathodes, but his earlier judgement was perhaps more correct.