Gastrolobium spinosumBenth.

Prickly Poison

WFO wfo-0000187917 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Gastrolobium spinosum, photographed by tobyyy
fig. a tobyyy, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2019-10-12 / obs. 99468485

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection

Herbarium
Smithsonian, US National Herbarium
Accession
US 3717555
Filed as
Gastrolobium spinosum Benth.
Det. by
Egan, Ashley N., (US), Smithsonian Institution - National Museum of Natural History (UNITED STATES)
Collected
S. Carlquist 1967-09-07
Origin
AU
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC0 1.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 1 botanical country

Regions where Gastrolobium spinosum is native: Western Australia Western Australia
Native distribution of Gastrolobium spinosum, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Western Australia WAU AUSTRALASIA

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 165 in flower of 228 examined

Proportion of examined Gastrolobium spinosum in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 2 7 29% 8% to 64%
Feb 2 2 too few examined
Mar 0 6 0% 0% to 39%
Apr 1 8 13% 2% to 47%
May 0 6 0% 0% to 39%
Jun 2 5 40% 12% to 77%
Jul 3 9 33% 12% to 65%
Aug 10 18 56% 34% to 75%
Sep 51 59 86% 75% to 93%
Oct 63 64 98% 92% to 100%
Nov 27 36 75% 59% to 86%
Dec 4 8 50% 22% to 78%

Peak flowering in Oct. Each bar is the share of Gastrolobium spinosum observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 165 of 228 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. One month has fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for it. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Where it actually grows measured, from 441 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low 5.0 °C 5.8 °C 10.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 23.7 °C 30.2 °C 32.6 °C
Annual rainfall 365 mm 579 mm 937 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 34 mm 44 mm 67 mm

It is barely found anywhere that freezes. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 441 research-grade observations of Gastrolobium spinosum that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 12 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

  • Gastrolobium preissii Meisn.
  • Gastrolobium spinosum f. angustum (Pritz.) D.A.Herb.
  • Gastrolobium spinosum f. crassifolium D.A.Herb.
  • Gastrolobium spinosum f. oliganthum Domin
  • Gastrolobium spinosum f. parvifolium D.A.Herb.
  • Gastrolobium spinosum f. typicum D.A.Herb.
  • Gastrolobium spinosum var. angustum Pritz.
  • Gastrolobium spinosum var. inerme S.Moore
  • Gastrolobium spinosum var. microphyllum S.Moore
  • Gastrolobium spinosum var. spinosum
  • Gastrolobium spinosum var. subinerve Domin
  • Oxylobium ruscifolium Jacques

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
  3. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.