Stinging tree

Description

Dendrocnide moroides, commonly known in Australia as the stinging tree, stinging bush or gympie-gympie, is a plant in the nettle family Urticaceae found in rainforest areas of Malesia and Australia. It is notorious for its extremely painful and long-lasting sting. The common name gympie-gympie comes from the language of the indigenous Gubbi Gubbi people of south-eastern Queensland. D. moroides is a straggly perennial understory shrub, usually flowering and fruiting when less than 3 m (9.8 ft) tall, but it may reach up to 10 m (33 ft) in height. It is superficially similar to Dendrocnide cordifolia, with the most obvious difference being the point of attachment of the petiole to the leaf blade—where D. moroides is peltate, i.e. the stalk attaches to the underside of the leaf and not at the edge, D. cordifolia is cordate. The stem, branches, petioles, leaves, and fruits are all covered in stinging hairs. It has large, heart-shaped, simple leaves about 12–22 cm (5–9 in) long and 11–18 cm (4–7 in) wide with toothed margins, a pointed tip and a cordate to obtuse base shape. There are six to eight pairs of lateral veins either side of the midrib. The petiole is quite long, about as long as the leaf blade itself, with stipules around 1–2 cm (0.39–0.79 in) long The inflorescence is monoecious (rarely dioecious), and is borne in the leaf axils. It is up to 15 cm (6 in) long, often paired. It carries both male and female flowers which are quite small, the perianth measuring less than 1 cm (0.4 in) across. Flowering occurs throughout the year, but mostly in summer. Fruits of this species are an achene (a tiny seed-like fruit), produced in number in a globular structure which is pink to light-purple in colour and has an appearance similar to a mulberry. Each achene, measuring just 2 mm (0.079 in) long, is contained in a small fleshy sac which derives from the swollen pedicel. As with the rest of this plant, the infructescences are also covered in stinging hairs, but are edible if the hairs are removed The type specimen for this species was collected in 1819 by Allan Cunningham near the Endeavour River, and was first described in 1857 by Hugh Algernon Weddell as Laportea moroides in his work Monographie de la Famille des Urticées, published in the journal Archives du Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle. The current binomial combination was published by Wee-Lek Chew in The Gardens' Bulletin Singapore in 1966.