Bertya brownii is a species of flowering plant in the family Euphorbiaceae and is endemic to New South Wales. It is a slender shrub with narrowly elliptic to elliptic or oblong leaves, flowers borne singly in leaf axils or on the ends of branches, and narrowly oval capsules with a dark brown seed.
Description.
"Bertya brownii" is a monoecious shrub that typically grows to a height of and is covered with rust-coloured, star-shaped hairs. Its leaves are narrowly elliptic to elliptic or egg-shaped to oblong, mostly long and wide on a petiole long. The flowers are borne singly in leaf axils or on the ends of branches on a peduncle long. There are four to six narrowly egg-shaped to linear bracts at the base of the peduncle. Male flowers are sessile or on a pedicel up to long with petal-like segments long and five egg-shaped sepal lobes long and wide. Male flowers have 56 to 94 stamens fused at the base. Female flowers are borne on a pedicel long, the five sepal lobes light green and narrowly triangular, long and wide. There are no petals, the ovary is densely hairy at first and the style is long with three spreading red limbs long with lobes long. Flowering has been recorded in most months, and the fruit is a narrowly oval capsule long and wide with a single oblong, dark brown seed long and wide with a creamy-white caruncle.
Taxonomy.
"Bertya brownii" was first formally described in 1905 by Spencer Le Marchant Moore in the "Journal of Botany, British and Foreign" from specimens collected by Robert Brown.
Distribution and habitat.
This species of "Bertya" is found in deep, moist sandstone gullies in rainforest and eucalypt forest in coastal and near-coastal areas of New South Wales between Wauchope and Batemans Bay.