Silver Wattle

Acacia podalyriifolia

Description

Tall shrub to small tree, three to five metres high with a slender trunk, low branched with a spreading crown. Bark is grey and smooth; the branchlets are covered with dense rigid hairs.

Mature leaves are alternate, ovate to elliptic or oblong, two to five centimetres. Long and twelve to thirty millimetres wide, on very short stalks, mealy blue on both surfaces, with thickened margins and a prominent mid-rib.

Flowers are golden yellow and crowded into fluffy globular heads six to eight millimetres across on stalks four to seven millimetres long, arranged in axilliary or terminal racemes five to ten centimetres long. It is a spectacular sight in full bloom.

Fruits are broad oblong, flat silver-grey turning brown pods with raised margins, three to nine centimetres long and ten to twenty-five millimetres wide, ripe in summer. Flowering in winter from May to July. The tree grows in sandy, well-drained clay soils both inland and along the coast of Qld and north-eastern NSW.

Doctrine of Signatures

Made up around the shortest day of the year, its brilliant yellow flowers bring brightness and light into the drabness of the contracted days of winter. The flowers are balls of sunlight illuminating the greyness, opening us up to the light again, as the sun begins to trace its return journey back into the fullness of summer.

The sun is the central light source for the planet we inhabit. If the sun were to disappear suddenly, life on this plant would cease to exist. Virtually all life occurs because sunlight has been transformed in one way or another into form.