Persoonia bowgada facts for kids
Persoonia bowgada is a special type of flowering plant. It belongs to the Proteaceae family, which includes many unique Australian plants. This plant is only found in the south-west part of Western Australia. It's a shrub that grows upright or spreads out, and it has smooth bark. Its leaves are long and thin, and its flowers are yellow. You can usually see these yellow flowers in groups at the ends of its branches.
Quick facts for kids Persoonia bowgada |
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| Scientific classification | |
| Genus: |
Persoonia
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| Species: |
bowgada
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Contents
About the Bowgada Geebung
What It Looks Like
The Persoonia bowgada is a shrub that can grow straight up or spread out. It usually reaches a height of 1 to 3.5 meters (about 3 to 11 feet). It has smooth bark that looks mottled, meaning it has patches of different shades of grey.
Its leaves are quite unique. They are mostly round like a cylinder, but they have six narrow grooves along them. Each leaf also has a sharp, pointed tip. These leaves are usually 50 to 110 millimeters (about 2 to 4.3 inches) long and very thin, only 0.7 to 1.3 millimeters wide.
The flowers of this plant are yellow. They grow in groups of up to ten at the very ends of the branches. Even after the flowers bloom, the branchlets keep growing. Each flower sits on a small stalk called a pedicel, which is covered in tiny hairs and is about 2.5 to 7 millimeters long.
The flower parts, called tepals, are also yellow. They are 11 to 15.5 millimeters long and 2 to 2.5 millimeters wide. The outside of the tepals is covered in dense hairs. Inside the flower, the anthers (parts that hold pollen) are also yellow. This plant usually flowers from October to November.
After flowering, the plant produces a fruit. This fruit is smooth and shaped like a narrow oval. It's a type of drupe, which means it has a fleshy outer part and a hard pit inside. The fruit is 10 to 14.5 millimeters long and 4 to 7 millimeters wide. Each fruit contains just one seed.
How It Got Its Name
The scientific name for this plant, Persoonia bowgada, was first officially described in 1994. It was named by a scientist named Peter Henry Weston. He wrote about it in a science journal called Telopea. The plants he studied were collected by another scientist, John Stanley Beard, near the Murchison River in 1980.
The second part of its name, bowgada, is a special reference. It comes from the "bowgada" plant community. This community is named after a type of wattle tree, Acacia ramulosa var. linophylla, which is also called bowgada. The Persoonia bowgada often grows in the same areas as these wattle trees. Also, the Persoonia bowgada looks a bit like the wattle, which is why it shares the name.
Where It Lives
This geebung plant grows in the south-west part of Western Australia. You can find it within 100 kilometers (about 62 miles) of the coast. Its range stretches between Shark Bay and the Murchison River.
It likes to grow in specific types of environments, or habitats. These include bowgada woodland, which is a type of forest with bowgada wattle trees. It also grows in eucalypt woodland, which has eucalyptus trees, and in mallee heath, which is a shrubland with short, multi-stemmed trees.
Its Conservation Status
The Persoonia bowgada is currently classified as "not threatened." This means that the Western Australian Government's Department of Parks and Wildlife believes there are enough of these plants in the wild, and they are not at risk of disappearing.
