Podolobium ilicifolium (Native Holly)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Podolobium ilicifolium, photographed by Greg Tasney — fig. a Greg Tasney, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2022-05-06 / obs. 195553056

Podolobium ilicifolium, photographed by Thomas Mesaglio — fig. b Thomas Mesaglio, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 181030032

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 2390027
Filed as: Podolobium ilicifolium (Andrews) Crisp & P.H.Weston
Det. by: not recorded on this sheet
Collected: H. S. McKee 1960-09-18
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 3 botanical countries

Native distribution of Podolobium ilicifolium, 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.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
New South Wales	NSW	AUSTRALASIA
Queensland	QLD
Victoria	VIC

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 251 in flower of 391 examined

75%

12%

24%

29%

33%

19%

15%

81%

90%

88%

40%

69%

Proportion of examined Podolobium ilicifolium in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	6	8	75%	41% to 93%
Feb	2	17	12%	3% to 34%
Mar	5	21	24%	11% to 45%
Apr	7	24	29%	15% to 49%
May	5	15	33%	15% to 58%
Jun	3	16	19%	7% to 43%
Jul	3	20	15%	5% to 36%
Aug	25	31	81%	64% to 91%
Sep	95	106	90%	82% to 94%
Oct	72	82	88%	79% to 93%
Nov	10	25	40%	23% to 59%
Dec	18	26	69%	50% to 84%

Peak flowering in Sep. Each bar is the share of Podolobium ilicifolium 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. 251 of 391 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 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 1,424 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	1.2 °C	6.5 °C	11.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	22.9 °C	25.3 °C	28.5 °C
Annual rainfall	778 mm	1,051 mm	1,410 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	114 mm	166 mm	231 mm

It is found where winters are cool but frost is light or absent. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,424 research-grade observations of Podolobium ilicifolium 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 13 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.

Callistachys ilicifolia (Andrews) Kuntze
Callistachys staurophylla (Sieber ex DC.) Kuntze
Chorizema trilobum Sm.
Oxylobium ilicifolium (Andrews) Domin
Oxylobium staurophyllum (Sieber ex DC.) Benth.
Oxylobium trilobatum (Sm.) Benth.
Oxylobium trilobatum var. staurophyllum (Sieber ex DC.) Maiden & Betche
Podolobium aquifolium G.Don
Podolobium berberifolium A.Cunn. ex Lindl.
Podolobium bidwellianum J.W.Loudon
Podolobium staurophyllum Sieber ex DC.
Podolobium trilobatum R.Br.
Pultenaea ilicifolia Andrews

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
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.