The open plant encyclopedia
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.
The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.
Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.
Santalum acuminatum
Also called Desert Peach, Desert Quandong, Burn Burn, Sweet Ouandong, Western Quandong
Sweet quandong is a hemiparasitic tree or shrub of Australia's arid interior, grown for its edible red fruit. It needs full sun and very well-drained soil, and it draws some nutrients from the roots of neighbouring plants.
Santalum acuminatum, the desert quandong, is an evergreen, hemiparasitic tree in the sandalwood family, Santalaceae, which is widely dispersed throughout the central deserts and southern areas of Australia.
The tree's fruit, known as quandongs or native peaches, are used as bush tucker and as an exotic flavouring, which has led to attempts to domesticate the tree. The fruit can be stewed to make filling for quandong pies or made into a fruit juice drink. The kernels inside the stones of the fruit can be crushed into a paste and then used on sore gums or gum boils to ease the pain. Because it is one of the few drought-tolerant fruit trees in far-west New South Wales, the tree is widely utilised by Australian Aboriginals.
The fruit and nut were important foods to the peoples of arid and semiarid central Australia, especially for its high vitamin C content. It is commercially grown and marketed as a bush food and is sometimes made into a jam, an enterprise begun in the 1970s. It is well known as an exotic food.
Santalum acuminatum is widely distributed throughout most southern regions of mainland Australia, including the arid centre of the country, and in some regions is common. The related Australian sandalwood, Santalum spicatum, was once more populous than this species; commercial exploitation has reversed this position.
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Santalum acuminatum 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.
