Hibbertia conferta Toelken APNI* Description: Shrub to c. 0.5 m high, forming dense stands with multiple slender, wiry to thread-like branches arising from the base. Young stems indistinctly ridged continuing from the decurrent leaf bases, glabrescent, with appressed, antrorse straight simple hairs, with shorts intrapetiolar tufts of hairs c. 0.2 mm long.
Leaves linear to linear-lanceolate (4.1–) 5 – 7.5 (-8.6) mm long, 0.4 – 0.6 mm wide, subsessile, spreading, glabrous; margins strongly revolute, tightly abutting the midrib and obscuring the abaxial lamina but occasionally showing rows of minute teeth between them; adaxial surface ± flat and glabrous; apex acuminate with a pungent awn to 0.7 mm long.
Flowers solitary, terminal, sessile. Bracts 3–5, herbaceous, primary bract linear-triangular 2.2 – 2.4 mm long, secondary bracts shorter, not grading into the leaves. Sepals unequal, glabrous; outer sepals lanceolate 4.2 – 4.5 mm long, acuminate with a short awn; inner sepals elliptic-lanceolate 3.8 – 4.2 mm long, rounded at apex. Petals 5, yellow, linear-oblanceolate to rarely cuneate-obovate, 4.5 – 6.3 mm long, emarginate to shallowly bilobed. Stamens 6, on one side of the carpels, ± erect; filaments scarcely connate at base; anthers oblong, 1.5 – 1.6 mm long, dehiscing by introrse longitudinal slits; staminodes absent. Carpels 2, densely hairy except for a glabrous crest.
Flowering: Flowers September – November.
Distribution and occurrence: Recorded from Abercrombie Karst Conservation Reserve. Hillsides in eucalypt woodland with shrubby understorey.
NSW subdivisions: CT
Known only from the type specimen. Hibbertia conferta was previously included within the broadly circumscribed H. acicularis complex. The specific epithet conferta (Latin: ‘dense’) refers to the compact, much-branched form of the shrublets.
Text by A.E. Orme (July 2025)
Taxon concept: Toelken (2024), Notes on Hibbertia subgen. Hemistemma (Dilleniaceae) 13. The eastern Australian H. acicularis and H. perhamata groups
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