Cryptocarya cunninghamii, commonly known as Cunningham's laurel or coconut laurel,[1] is a species of flowering plant in the laurel family and is endemic to northern Australia. It is a tree with oblong to elliptic leaves, the flowers creamy-green and tube-shaped, and the fruit a spherical black to purplish-blackdrupe.
Cryptocarya cunninghamii is a tree that typically grows to a height of up to, its stem sometimes buttressed. Its leaves are oblong to elliptic, long and wide on a petiole long. The flowers are creamy-green, unpleasantly perfumed, and arranged in panicles usually shorter than the leaves. The perianth tube is long and wide, the tepals long, wide and hairy. The outer anthers are long and wide and glabrous, the inner anthers long. Flowering occurs from May to October, and the fruit is a spherical black to purplish-black drupe long and wide.[2] [3]
Cryptocarya cunninghamii was first formally described in 1864 by Carl Meissner in de Candolle's Prodromus Systematis Naturalis Regni Vegetabilis from specimens collected by Allan Cunningham near the Hunter River.[4] [5]
Cunningham's laurel grows in shallow or rocky soils in gorges with sandstone boulders, in coastal lowland rainforest and monsoon rainforest at altitudes from sea level to, in the Northern Kimberley and Victoria Bonaparte bioregions of Western Australia, the Arnhem Coast, Arnhem Plateau, Daly Basin, Darwin Coastal, Pine Creek, Tiwi Cobourg and Victoria Bonaparte bioregions of the Northern Territory, and the Cape York Peninsula, Wet Tropics and Hinchinbrook Island of Queensland. It probably also occurs in New Guinea.