Cryptocarya foetida, commonly known as stinking cryptocarya or stinking laurel, is a species of flowering plant in the family Lauraceae and is endemic to eastern Australia. It is a small to medium-sized tree with egg-shaped to elliptic leaves, cream coloured, unpleasantly perfumed, tube-shaped flowers, and spherical black to purplish drupes.
Cryptocarya foetida is a small or medium-sized tree that typically grows to a height of up to, the stem not butressed with a trunk dbh of . The leaves are egg-shaped to elliptic or oval, long and wide on a petiole long. Both surfaces of the leaves are glabrous with prominent veins, and the lower surface is paler. The flowers are arranged in dense panicles that are shorter than the leaves, the perianth tube long and wide. The tepals are long and wide, the outer anthers long and wide, the inner anthers long and wide. Flowering mainly occurs in February, and the fruit is a spherical black to purplish-black drupe, long and wide.[1] [2]
Cryptocarya foetida was first formally described in 1905 by Richard Thomas Baker in the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales.[3] [4] The specific epithet (foetida) is a Latin word meaning 'stinking' or 'evil-smelling.[5]
Stinking cryptocarya occurs from east of Gympie in southern Queensland to Iluka in northern New South Wales, where it grows in littoral rainforest on old sand dunes.
This species of Cryptocarya is listed as "vulnerable" under the Australian Government Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 and the New South Wales Government Biodiversity Conservation Act 2016. The main threats to the species are its small population size, clearing and fragmentation of habitat, and weed invasion.