Darwinia vestita, commonly known as pom-pom darwinia, is a species of flowering plant in the family Myrtaceae and is endemic to the southwest of Western Australia. It is an erect, bushy shrub with crowded egg-shaped, oblong, or linear leaves and more or less spherical heads of white to reddish-pink flowers.
Darwinia vestita is an erect, bushy shrub that typically grows to height of and has both short, and long arching branches. Its leaves are crowded, egg-shaped, oblong to almost linear, long, the upper surface concave and the lower surface with a prominent keel. The flowers are arranged in more or less spherical heads on a peduncle about long with bracts that fall off as the flowers open. The sepals are about long with small, scale-like lobes, the petals white or reddish-pink and about long. Flowering occurs from July to December.[1]
This species was first formally described in 1837 by Stephan Endlicher who gave it the name Genetyllis vestita in Enumeratio plantarum quas in Novae Hollandiæ ora austro-occidentali ad fluvium Cygnorum et in sinu Regis Georgii collegit Carolus Liber Baro de Hügel.[2] [3] In 1865, George Bentham changed the name to Darwinia vestita and published the change in the Journal of the Linnean Society, Botany.[4] The specific epithet (vestita) means "clothed" or "covered", referring to the overlapping leaves in herbarium specimens.[5]
Darwinia vestita is found on stony hillsides, sandplains, granite outcrops, coastal areas and swamps in a wide area of the Avon Wheatbelt, Esperance Plains, Jarrah Forest, Mallee, Swan Coastal Plain and Warren bioregions of south-western Western Australia.