A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1039 entries
banksia
An Australian genus of around 170 shrubs and trees carrying dense cylindrical or dome-shaped flower spikes made of hundreds of individual flowers packed together — brushes of yellow, orange, red, or greenish gold, full of nectar and worked over by honeyeaters, and by possums and bats at night. The spent spike hardens into a woody cone studded with follicles, each holding two seeds.
Etymology
New Latin, for Joseph Banks, who botanized at Botany Bay in 1770 from the Endeavour and collected the first specimens Europeans had seen. Linnaeus the younger formally erected the genus in 1782 and hung Banks’s name on it. It is an unusually apt piece of naming for once: Banks was the man who made English science pay attention to Australian plants.
Notes
Many banksias are serotinous — the woody follicles stay sealed for years and open in heat, so the seed is released onto ground that has just been cleared and fertilized. Some species need that heat and get no seedlings without it. The sinister Big Bad Banksia Men in May Gibbs’s 1918 children’s book Snugglepot and Cuddlepie are drawn straight from a spent, follicle-eyed cone, which is why generations of Australian children look at one and see a face.