Oakey Bottlebrush

Melaleuca quercina
(Callistemon quercinus)
FAMILY: MYRTACEAE

I am so pleased to have been sent information about a Callistemon species which I had understood to be still unnamed. (see my article Feb 2011).




Apparently this very local plant was given a name in 2009 by Lyn Craven, working for CSIRO at the Australian National Herbarium. He has at last sorted out a number of closely related plants, establishing that this one, which is only known to occur in the blacksoil country from Oakey creek to Clifton, is a separate species. It was described and named from a specimen collected in 1991 on the western side of Brookvale Park Road, 10k west of Oakey, by Betty Ballingall.
Its new name, "Melaleuca quercina" requires a little explanation.
The plants that so many of us know as Callistemons have been moved into the Melaleuca genus which explains the first part of its name. All the "callistemons" are now officially melaleucas.
The second part, “quercina” is a rather dry little botany joke. Quercus is the Latin name for the trees we Australians call “English oaks”, and their relatives, so quercina refers to the plant’s habitat. Oakey Creek's name really has nothing to do with oaks of the Quercus kind, which is part of the joke, of course. It, and the town of Oakey which stands on its banks, got their name from the river she-oaks Casuarina cunninghamiana which once lined the creek.
If you want to be politically correct you can spell them “she-oke”, which is the modern approved spelling. The people who gave them the name in the first place didn’t care about political correctness. They named them after the familiar English oaks because of a similarity between the timbers, both of which, when quarter-sawn, have prominent and decorative medullary rays. Adding “she” to “oak” was, I am sorry to say, the way those men expressed the perceived inferiority of Casuarina timber.
So the link between Melaleuca quercina and any actual Quercus is a very tenuous one indeed - but I like it!
I suggest that, for a common name, we could settle for calling it "Oakey bottlebrush".

ADDENDUM 2018.
Botanists do seem to be forever fiddling with the taxonomy of our plants!
When I first wrote this article, the name Melaleuca quercina applied only to the plants described above, which occur in creek banks on the Darling Downs eastwards from Dalby.
It was named by Lyn Craven in 2009.
At the same time, Craven named a similar plant Melaleuca phratra. This one also grows on creek banks, but in the area between Injune and Texas.
Then in 2016 Tony Bean reviewed the genus, and decided that Melaleuca phratra was so similar to Melaleuca quercina that it should be included in it, (and the name M. phratra discontinued.)
Now what are we amateurs to make of that? They all have the same name now, but is the Oakey bottlebrush really the same thing as the Injune bottlebrush?
Well, not quite. Otherwise Lyn Craven would not have carefully separated them out.
Does it matter that they are not quite the same?
That depends on whether you want to grow the plant, and if so, why. If you just want a pretty garden plant, one is as good as the other.
However if you want to do some serious revegetation work, you should use plants grown from the seed of your local type. An Injune  Melaleuca quercina would be out of place in Oakey, and one from Cambooya would be out of place in Texas.
Plants grown from Cambooya seed, however, however, would be appropriate at Oakey. 

AND A CURIOUS CASE OF COMMON NAME KIDNAP.
Before I wrote this article in 2011, the Oakey bottlebrush was most usually known as "species Injune" or "Injune Pink". I thought a new common name was required, to distinguish our eastern Darling Downs species from the Injune species, and suggested one derived (loosely) from the botanical name, but also appropriate as it was a specimen from Oakey that Craven used as the type specimen for the name.
The name took off. And then Melaleuca phratra was absorbed into M. quercina. (Why wasn't it the other way round, by the way?) Now we find people using the name "Oakey bottlebrush" for plants from Injune.
Isn't that odd?