Cryptocarya pleurosperma, commonly known as poison walnut or poison laurel,[1] is a species of flowering plant in the family Lauraceae and is endemic to north-east Queensland. It is a tree with oblong to elliptic leaves, cream coloured, perfumed flowers, and usually spherical, ribbed, red drupes.
Cryptocarya pleurosperma is a tree that typically grows to a height of up to, its stems sometimes buttressed. Its leaves are oblong to elliptic, long and wide, on a petiole long. The flowers cream-coloured and perfumed, arranged in panicles or reduced to a raceme in leaf axils shorter than the leaves. The perianth tube is long and wide, the tepals long and wide. The outer anthers are long and wide, the inner anthers glabrous, long and wide. Flowering occurs from January to March, and the fruit is usually a spherical, ribbed, red drupe, long and wide with cream-coloured cotyledons.[2]
Cryptocarya pleurosperma was first formally described in 1924 by Cyril Tenison White and William Douglas Francis in Proceedings of the Royal Society of Queensland from specimens collected by White on Mount Bellenden Ker.[3] [4]
Poison walnut grows in rainforest at altitudes from sea level to from near the Bloomfield River to near Palmerston in north-east Queensland.
This species of Cryptocarya is listed as "of least concern" under the Queensland Government Nature Conservation Act 1992.[5]