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Acacia melanoxylon
Also called Australian Blackwood, Paluma Blackwood, Tasmanian Blackwood, Black Sally, Black Wattle, Blackwood Acacia, Sally Wattle
Blackwood is a fast-growing Australian tree or large shrub, valued for its timber and bush tucker seeds. It does best in fertile, moist soil with good drainage and cool conditions.
Acacia melanoxylon, commonly known as blackwood, Tasmanian blackwood, hickory, sally wattle, black sally or mudgerabah, is a species of flowering plant in the family Fabaceae and is endemic to south-eastern Australia. It is a tree, sometimes a shrub, with hard, fissured and somewhat scaly bark, ribbed, usually glabrous branchlets, narrowly elliptic or lance-shaped phyllodes, spherical heads of creamy pale yellow to white flowers, and strongly curved to openly coiled pods.
Blackwood is widespread and often common, found from the Atherton Tableland and south through the highlands of Queensland, New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory, Victoria and Tasmania. It is also found in the Mount Lofty and Flinders Ranges in South Australia and is sometimes naturalised in Western Australia. It grows in a variety of habitats, favouring fertile valley soils and flats in mountainous areas, often and forest and cooler rainforest, sometimes in drier eucalypt forest and woodland. In Tasmania, it is often the dominant tree in forested seasonal swamps.
Indigenous Australians use many parts of A. melanoxylon for a variety of purposes. Seeds are harvested and consumed as a common bush tucker food, and leaves can be used as a soap or fishing poison. The bark is either harvested to make string or prepared as a traditional analgesic, while wood is often used to make clap sticks, spear-throwers and shields.
Jam wattle · Mulga · Acacia aneura var. major · Mulga · Earleaf acacia · Cootamundra wattle · Gidgee · Bower wattle · Cole's Wattle · Small Philippine acacia · Knife acacia · Silver Wattle
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Acacia melanoxylon by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
