Plant Wiki

The open plant encyclopedia

Know any plant.
Grow it well.

Snap a photo or search by any name to see how to care for it, where it comes from, whether it's safe, and a 3D model you can turn.

  • 13,000+plants with full pages
  • 365,000+plant species worldwide
  • 220+countries covered

Common in

See all

The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.

What do you want to do?

Popular plants

Browse all plants

See them in 3D

All plants in 3D

Browse plants

Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.

Plant Wiki › Browse plants

Melaleuca quercina

Melaleuca quercina, Oakey bottlebrush, is a large shrub or small tree from a small area of Queensland, grown for its bottlebrush flowers and corky bark. It is a species, not a genus, and is native to creek banks on dark clay soils.

Family
Myrtaceae (Myrtle family)
Grows as
Tree
Light
Full sun
Water
Water regularly when young, then tolerate dry spells once established.
Soil
Heavy or dark clay soils; tolerates a range of soils once established.
Temperature
Suited to warm temperate to subtropical conditions; frost hardy to moderate frost, protect young plants from hard frost.
How easy
Easy
Native range
Queensland
Climate
seasonally dry tropical

About

Melaleuca quercina, commonly known as Oakey bottlebrush is a plant in the myrtle family, Myrtaceae and is endemic to a small area of Queensland in Australia. (Some Australian state herbaria use the name Callistemon quercinus.) It is small tree with dark, corky bark and spikes of yellow, cream or pink bottlebrush flowers in spring and summer.

Where it grows

Melaleuca quercina occurs in the Oakey and Dalby districts in Queensland, where it grows along the banks and flats of creeks in dark clay soils.

Other Callistemon plants

Melaleuca comboynensis · Callistemon kenmorrisonii · Melaleuca linearifolia · Melaleuca pearsonii · Melaleuca pityoides · Melaleuca orophila · Bottlebrush · Prickly Bottlebrush · Melaleuca buseana · Melaleuca flammea · Melaleuca flavovirens · Melaleuca formosa

Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Melaleuca quercina 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.

Credits & terms

Identify a plant

Point at a leaf or flower and snap. One plant in frame works best.

Your photo
Starting camera…