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Verticordia oculata is a small, sprawling Western Australian shrub in the myrtle family, prized for its large, eye-like silver-white and lilac flowers. It is grown in full sun on well-drained sand and is prone to fungal problems in humid conditions.
Verticordia oculata is a flowering plant in the myrtle family, Myrtaceae and is endemic to Western Australia. It is a sprawling woody shrub with large, circular leaves with white edges and silver-white flowers with a dark centre of lilac and purple, the largest flowers of the genus Verticordia. The botanist Ferdinand von Mueller reportedly became entranced by its floral display when he visited the northern sandplains area in 1877, later describing the shrub as the 'princess of Australian flora'.
This small shrub has been described as "spectacularly beautiful" and both it and the hybrid Verticordia 'Wemms find' have horticultural potential. Its branching habit, pale leaves and large flowers are especially attractive but it is not well known in cultivation outside Western Australia, where some examples have grown for more than 14 years. It can be propagated from cuttings but when grown on its own roots, tends to suffer from fungal attack, especially in humid areas such as Sydney. Established plants grown in Western Australia have shown to be frost resistant and have tolerated heavy summer rainfall.
Verticordia oculata is found growing with several other species of the genus, in heaths and shrublands, on white, red, and yellow sand. It occurs on sandplains and ridges in the Avon Wheatbelt, Carnarvon, Geraldton Sandplains and Yalgoo biogeographic regions. It has a distribution range north of the Principality of Hutt River to a locality west of the Billabong Roadhouse. Specimens have been recorded near the coast and inland to Yuna.
Verticordia acerosa · Verticordia aereiflora · White featherflower · Verticordia amphigia · Verticordia apecta · Verticordia argentea · Verticordia attenuata · Verticordia aurea · Verticordia auriculata · Verticordia bifimbriata · Verticordia blepharophylla · Verticordia brachypoda
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Verticordia oculata 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.
