About Grevillea repens F.Muell.
Grevillea repens (creeping grevillea) is a prostrate, trailing, often mat-forming shrub that typically reaches 3 meters (9.8 feet) across. Its leaves are narrowly oblong to egg-shaped or elliptic, measuring 15–115 mm (0.59–4.53 in) long and 10–40 mm (0.39–1.57 in) wide. Leaf edges usually have 5 to 19 more or less evenly spaced teeth or lobes up to 3 mm (0.12 in) long, and these teeth are sometimes sharply pointed. The lower leaf surface is usually covered with wavy, flattened hairs pressed against the surface. Flowers grow in clusters at the ends of branches, arranged along one side of a 35–80 mm (1.4–3.1 in) long rachis. The flowers themselves are light green or grey with reddish stripes, with a pistil 16–19 mm (0.63–0.75 in) long. The style is deep red, or dull orange to yellow, and is glabrous. Flowering occurs between October and April, and the dry fruit is a 10–12 mm (0.39–0.47 in) long silky-hairy follicle. This species occurs in montane eucalypt forests in two main regions of central Victoria. One is an eastern population centered around the Kinglake area, and the other is a western population extending from near Daylesford to the Lerderderg Gorge area. Eastern region plants (the Mt Slide form) can reproduce both sexually via seed and clonally via root suckering, and tend to have lower fertility than western (Daylesford) population plants. Plants from the western population regenerate by seed, or by reshooting from a lignotuber after disturbance events such as fire. Some clonally reproducing plants from the eastern region are triploid, with three sets of chromosomes, while the species is typically diploid with 2n=20. Populations in the Lerderderg Gorge have closer genetic and morphological similarity to plants from the Daylesford area than to those from the Kinglake area. Western populations have the widest range of floral color variants, with styles ranging from green to dark red, while styles in eastern populations range from dark red to deep burgundy.
