Petrophile sessilis, known as conesticks, is a species of flowering plant in the family Proteaceae and is endemic to New South Wales. It is an erect shrub with rigid, needle-shaped, divided, sharply-pointed leaves, and oval, spike-like heads of silky-hairy, creamy-yellow flowers.
Petrophile sessilis is an erect shrub that typically grows to a height of and has branchlets and leaves that are silky-hairy when young but become glabrous with age. The leaves are long and divided with rigid, sharply-pointed, needle-shaped pinnae usually less than long. The flowers are arranged on the ends of branchlets and in leaf axils in spike-like, oval heads long, with broadly egg-shaped involucral bracts at the base. The flowers are long, silky-hairy and creamy-yellow. Flowering mainly occurs from May to February and the fruit is a nut, fused with others in a oval head up to long.[1] It can be distinguished from the related Petrophile pulchella by its finely hairy new growth.[2]
Petrophile sessilis was first formally described in 1827 by Josef August Schultes in the 16th edition of Systema Vegetabilium from an unpublished description by Franz Sieber.[3] [4]
Petrophile sessilis grows on sandstone soils in heath, woodland and forest from the Central Coast to the Central and Southern Tablelands of New South Wales.