Petrophile helicophylla is a species of flowering plant in the family Proteaceae and is endemic to southwestern Western Australia. It is a prostrate, spreading shrub with twisted, needle-like leaves and heads of hairy white to creamy-white or pale pink flowers.
Petrophile helicophylla is a shrub that typically grows to high, wide and has glabrous branchlets and leaves. The leaves are needle-shaped long and spirally twisted. The flowers are arranged on the ends of branchlets in heads long and sessile or on peduncles long, with a few tapering involucral bracts at the base. The flowers are about long, white to creamy-white or pale pink and hairy. Flowering mainly occurs from October to February and the fruit is a nut, fused with others in an elliptic to spherical head long.[1] [2]
Petrophile helicophylla was first formally described in 1990 by Donald Bruce Foreman in Muelleria from material he collected near Ravensthorpe in 1979.[3] The specific epithet (helicophylla) means "coil-leaved".[4]
This petrophile grows in low heath, scrub and woodland on sand plains and near salt pans near Ravensthorpe and Jerramungup in the Esperance Plains and Mallee biogeographic regions of southwestern Western Australia.
Petrophile helicophylla is classified as "not threatened" by the Western Australian Government Department of Parks and Wildlife.