Jacksonia aculeata is a species of flowering plant in the family Fabaceae and is endemic to the northern Australia. It is a spreading shrub with sharply-pointed, hairy, short side branches, leaves reduced to scales, lemon-yellow flowers, and woody, hairy pods.
Jacksonia aculeata is a sturdy, spreading shrub that typically grows up to high and wide, its branches greyish-green with sharply-pointed phylloclades about wide. Its leaves are reduced to narrowly egg-shaped scales, long and wide. The flowers are scattered along the branches in the axils of scale leaves on a pedicel long. There are narrowly egg-shaped bracteoles long on the pedicels. The floral tube is long and the sepals are membranous, the upper lobes long and wide, the lower lobes long, wide and fused at the base. The petals are lemon-yellow without markings, the standard petal long, the wings long, and the keel long. The stamens have pink filaments long. Flowering occurs from April to October, and the fruit is a woody, hairy pod long and wide.[1] [2]
Jacksonia aculeata was first formally described in 1918 by William Vincent Fitzgerald in Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of Western Australia from specimens he collected near the Fitzroy River.[3] The specific epithet (aculeata) means 'prickly' referring to the scale leaves.[4]
Jacksonia aculeata grows on sand dunes and sandplains from the eastern Pilbara to the Great Sandy and Tanami Deserts in northern Western Australia and the Northern Territory.