Banksia telmatiaea

Banksia telmatiaea, commonly known as swamp fox banksia or rarely marsh banksia, is a shrub that grows in marshes and swamps along the lower west coast of Australia. It grows as an upright bush up to tall, with narrow leaves and a pale brown flower spike, which can produce profuse quantities of nectar. First collected in the 1840s, it was not published as a separate species until 1981; as with several other similar species it was previously included in B. sphaerocarpa (fox banksia). The shrub grows amongst scrubland in seasonally wet lowland areas of the coastal sandplain between Badgingarra and Serpentine in Western Australia. A little studied species, not much is known of its ecology or conservation biology. Reports suggest that it is pollinated by a variety of birds and small mammals. Like many members of series Abietinae, it has not been considered to have much horticultural potential and is rarely cultivated. B. telmatiaea grows as an upright bush up to high. It has hairy stems and branchlets, and straight, narrow leaves from long and about a wide. The leaves have a green upper surface and white hairy undersurface. The new growth is pale brown, later turning green. Flowers occur in "flower spikes", inflorescences made up of hundreds of flower pairs densely packed around a woody axis. Arising from short lateral branchlets off stems older than four years of age, the inflorescence of B. telmatiaea is roughly oval to cylindrical, with a height of and diameter of . It contains between 500 and 900 golden brown to pale brown flowers, each of which consists of a tubular perianth made up of four fused tepals, and one long wiry style. The styles are hooked rather than straight, and are initially trapped inside the upper perianth parts, but break free at anthesis. The species generally flowers from April to August, although flowers have been observed as late as November. They take five to six weeks to develop from bud, then reach anthesis over a period of two weeks.