Androcalva loxophylla is a species of flowering plant in the family Malvaceae and is endemic to northern Australia. It is a shrub with spreading or low-lying branches, oblong to broadly elliptic leaves and clusters of 4 to 20 yellow flowers.
Androcalva loxophylla is a shrub with spreading or low-lying branches and that typically grows to high and wide. Its leaves are variably shaped, typically oblong to broadly elliptic, long and wide on a petiole long with narrowly egg-shaped stipules long at the base. The edges of the leaves sometimes have rounded teeth, and both surfaces are covered with fine, star-shaped hairs, more densely so on the lower surface. The flowers are arranged in clusters of 4 to 20 opposite leaf axils on a peduncle long, each flower on a pedicel long, with a thin, brown bract long at first. The flowers are in diameter with 5 yellow, petal-like sepals and 5 yellow petals, the ligules spatula-shaped. There is a usually a single, yellow staminode between the stamens. Flowering occurs in most months with a peak from August to October and the fruit is a hairy, spherical capsule about in diameter.[1] [2]
This species was first formally described in 1859 by Ferdinand von Mueller who gave it the name Rulingia loxophylla in his Fragmenta Phytographiae Australiae.[3] In 2011, Carolyn Wilkins and Barbara Whitlock transferred the species to the genus Androcalva in Australian Systematic Botany.[4] The specific epithet (loxophylla) means "cross-wise-leaved", referring to the slanting leaf base of this species.[5]
Androcalva loxophylla often grows in dense suckering colonies in sand and is found from Broome in the far north-west of Western Australia, through the Great Victoria, Gibson and Little Sandy Deserts to Innamincka in South Australia and through the Northern Territory to Windorah in western Queensland.[6]