Daviesia horrida, commonly known as prickly bitter-pea, is a species of flowering plant in the family Fabaceae and is endemic to the south-west of Western Australia. It is a spreading shrub with rigid, spiny branchlets, narrowly elliptic phyllodes and orange and dark red flowers.
Daviesia horrida is a glabrous, spreading shrub that typically grows to a height of and has rigid, spiny, often leafless branchlets. The phyllodes, when present are narrowly elliptic to linear, long and wide. The flowers are borne in a raceme of three to ten flowers in leaf axils on a peduncle about long, the rachis long, each flower on a pedicel long with overlapping bracts about long at the base. The sepals are long and joined at the base with five equal lobes. The standard petal is broadly elliptic, long and orange with a dark red centre, the wings long and dark red, and the keel long and dark red. Flowering occurs from July to September and the fruit is a flattened, triangular and beaked pod long.[1]
Daviesia horrida was first formally described by Swiss botanist Carl Meissner in Johann Georg Christian Lehmann's Plantae Preissianae in 1844, from an unpublished description by Balthazar Preiss.[2] [3] The specific epithet (horrida) means "bristly or prickly".[4]
Prickly bitter-pea grows in the shrubby understorey of forest in hilly terrain between Bindoon, Busselton and the Pallinup River in the Esperance Plains, Jarrah Forest, Swan Coastal Plain and Warren biogeographic regions of south-western Western Australia.