Citation: J. Black, Fl.S. Aust. 357 (1924).

Synonymy: Not Applicable

Common name: Kangaroo Island turpentine bush.

Description:
Sticky dioecious bushes with slender terete ascending branchlets to 60 cm high, if with lines of white tomentum these usually obscured by a sticky covering all around; leaves linear, 3-10, usually 5-8mm long, 0.8-1.2 rarely to 1.6mm wide, shortly mucronate, cuneate into distinct 0.5-1 mm long petioles, margins entire, recurved, upper surface dark-green, glabrous, lower with a narrow band of white appressed tomentum on either side of the glabrous midrib.

Flowers solitary, axillary and/ or terminal on short shoots; male flowers on slender peduncles 1.2-4 commonly 1.5-3 mm long, white-pubescence; calyx lobes 5, rarely 4, imbricate in bud, rotate, ovate, unequal, 1-1.8 mm long, yellow or white to light-green, reddened in parts, pubescent at the base; disc narrow, with 13-28 crowded stamens; anthers usually longer than broad, with parallel cells on undivided connective; female flowers subsessile on peduncles to 0.6 mm long, white-pubescent; calyx lobes 5, ovate, 1-2 mm long, erect, more or less imbricate, enclosing the ovary apart form the stigmas; carpels 2, ovules 1 in each cell; stigmas 2 broad recurved flaps forming a 2-lobed cap appressed to the ovary.

fruit borne in persistent perianth-segments on an angular attenuate peduncle 0.2-1.3 mm long and 0.8-1 mm broad at the apex; capsule obliquely broad-ovoid, 3-3.5 x 2.1-2.8 mm, glabrous, dark-green with a persistent black stigmatic cup c. 0.5 mm high and 0.8-1 mm wide, with only 1 carpel developing seed; seed oblong, 2.7-3.5 x 2-2.5 mm, shiny, grey, dark-brown or black- and grey-mottled, topped by a sessile hemispherical brown-yellow fleshy caruncle less than half the diameter of the seed.

	Beyeria subtecta with opened male flower, twig of male plant, male flower, twig of female plant, female flower, fruit and seed.
Image source: fig 398c in Jessop J.P. & Toelken H.R. (Ed.) 1986. Flora of South Australia (4th edn).

	Beyeria subtecta with opened male flower.
Image source: fig 398c in Jessop J.P. & Toelken H.R. (Ed.) 1986. Flora of South Australia (4th edn).

Published illustration: Barker & Dashorst (1984) J. Adelaide Bot. Gard. 7:139.

Distribution:  S.Aust.: KI. Conservation status: native Flowering time: Sept. — Feb.

SA Distribution Map based on current data relating to specimens held in the State Herbarium of South Australia

Biology: No text

Taxonomic notes: The male plants sometimes can not be distinguished from its closest relative B. lechenaultii, with which it can occur sympatrically.

Author: Not yet available