Scientific name: Grevillea robusta
Common names: Silk-Oak; Silky Oak
Native range: eastern Australia
More information: Characteristics and requirements at davesgarden.com. Worthwhile Wikipedia entry as well.
The attractive yellow-orange flowers you see on the Silky Oak are in fact sepals, not petals. The Silky Oak flower has no petals!
Some guests of mine recently bought a pair of wildly exotic flowers for me as a gift for my hospitality: "Pincushion Protea" (Leucospermum cordifolium), a South African member of the Protea, or Sugarbush family. They knew that these were flowers I'd seen before, and been enamored with, but had been unable to identify. (I hadn't even heard of the Protea family!)
Imagine my surprise when I scaled a wall this morning to take the above photo of the Silky Oak flowers. They have a basically similar look as the Pincushion Protea! (To understand, see the above link to Pincushion Protea). I noticed this, but lacking confidence in my still premature knowledge of plant families, I decided the similarity was probably just superficial ("analogous", as the evolutionary biologists say).
Wrong!
Silky Oak is in fact a member of the Protea Family, along with a mere 1,200 or so other species. According to the Wikipedia entry on the Protea, "The Proteaceae family... is an ancient one. Its ancestors grew in Gondwanaland, 300 million years ago. Proteaceae is divided into two subfamilies: the Proteoideae, best represented in southern Africa, and the Grevilleoideae, concentrated in Australia and South America and the other smaller segments of Gondwanaland that are now part of eastern Asia." Read more from this entry, and find out why Linnaeus named this family after the Greek god Proteus.
Common names: Silk-Oak; Silky Oak
Native range: eastern Australia
More information: Characteristics and requirements at davesgarden.com. Worthwhile Wikipedia entry as well.
The attractive yellow-orange flowers you see on the Silky Oak are in fact sepals, not petals. The Silky Oak flower has no petals!
Some guests of mine recently bought a pair of wildly exotic flowers for me as a gift for my hospitality: "Pincushion Protea" (Leucospermum cordifolium), a South African member of the Protea, or Sugarbush family. They knew that these were flowers I'd seen before, and been enamored with, but had been unable to identify. (I hadn't even heard of the Protea family!)
Imagine my surprise when I scaled a wall this morning to take the above photo of the Silky Oak flowers. They have a basically similar look as the Pincushion Protea! (To understand, see the above link to Pincushion Protea). I noticed this, but lacking confidence in my still premature knowledge of plant families, I decided the similarity was probably just superficial ("analogous", as the evolutionary biologists say).
Wrong!
Silky Oak is in fact a member of the Protea Family, along with a mere 1,200 or so other species. According to the Wikipedia entry on the Protea, "The Proteaceae family... is an ancient one. Its ancestors grew in Gondwanaland, 300 million years ago. Proteaceae is divided into two subfamilies: the Proteoideae, best represented in southern Africa, and the Grevilleoideae, concentrated in Australia and South America and the other smaller segments of Gondwanaland that are now part of eastern Asia." Read more from this entry, and find out why Linnaeus named this family after the Greek god Proteus.
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