Melaleuca sylvana facts for kids

Melaleuca sylvana is a special plant that belongs to the myrtle family. You can only find it in a small area near Ravenshoe in Queensland, Australia. This plant was officially named in 2004. It looks a bit like another plant called Melaleuca monantha because it has tiny leaves and white flowers that grow in groups. However, Melaleuca sylvana is a bigger plant. It grows as a single shrub or a small tree and has a more open shape.

What it Looks Like

Melaleuca sylvana is a shrub or a small tree. It can grow up to 5 meters (about 16 feet) tall. It has an open shape, meaning its branches are not packed together. Its leaves are arranged in a special way: they grow in pairs, with each pair at a right angle to the one below it. This means the leaves form four neat rows along the stems.

The leaves are very small, only about 1.5 to 3.7 millimeters (0.06 to 0.15 inches) long. They are about 0.9 to 1.7 millimeters (0.04 to 0.07 inches) wide. Each leaf is shaped like an egg, with the narrower end at the bottom. If you cut a leaf in half, it would look like a crescent moon.

Flowers and Fruit

The flowers of Melaleuca sylvana are white. They grow in small groups or short spikes. You can find these flower groups between the leaves on the new parts of the plant. Each group of flowers can be up to 18 millimeters (about 0.7 inches) across. They can have up to 10 individual flowers in each group.

Inside each flower, there are stamens (the parts that make pollen). These stamens are grouped into five bundles around the flower. Each bundle has about 9 to 12 stamens. The flowers usually appear in December. After the flowers, the plant grows fruit. These fruits are woody capsules, which are like small, hard seed pods. Each capsule is about 4 millimeters (0.16 inches) long and 4 to 5 millimeters (0.16 to 0.2 inches) wide. They grow in round clusters that are about 9 millimeters (0.35 inches) across.

How it Got its Name

The plant Melaleuca sylvana was first officially described in 2004. It was named by two scientists, Craven and Andrew Ford. They wrote about it in a science journal called Muelleria. They studied a plant sample found near Herberton.

The second part of its name, sylvana, comes from a Latin word, sylva. This word means "wood" or "forest". This name was chosen because this plant is most often found growing in forests or woodlands.

Where it Lives

This type of melaleuca plant grows in the Ravenshoe and Herberton areas of Queensland. It likes to grow in different kinds of places, such as heath (areas with small shrubs), forests, and woodlands. It often grows in soil that comes from a type of rock called rhyolite.