Leucospermum tottum is indigenous to South Africa, where it grows on sandstone slopes at altitudes between 300 and 2000 meters, especially in the mountains of the southwestern Cape. It is part of the Cape Floral Kingdom, occurring only in the winter rainfall area. Pincushion proteas are popular cut flowers for floral arrangements because of their striking appearance and longevity.

3D cutaway view

The inflorescence consists of numerous bisexual zygomorphic flowers. Each individual flower is subtended by a bract and has a style, four stamens, and a cylindrical perianth. The perianth is longitudinally split by the lengthening style into a free lower segment with one stamen that becomes coiled after anthesis and an upper portion that is separated at the tip into three distinct lobes, each carrying a stamen. The sessile ovary at the base of the rigid style is too small to distinguish.

This specimen of a pincushion, pictured below, was obtained from a commercial source in Austin, Texas and was scanned for Dr. Wolfgang Stuppy of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK. Funding for scanning was provided by a National Science Foundation Digital Libraries Initiative grant to Dr. Timothy Rowe of the Department of Geological Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin.

This specimen was scanned by Matthew Colbert on 04 April 2002 along its long axis for a total of 435 1024x1024 pixel slices. Each slice is 0.2188 mm thick, with an interslice spacing of 0.2188 mm and a field of reconstruction of 105 mm.

Literature
Stuppy, W. H., Maisano, J. A., Colbert, M. W., Rudall, P. J., and T. B. Rowe. 2003. Three-dimensional analysis of plant structure using high-resolution X-ray computed tomography. Trends in Plant Science 8:2-6.

Links
Leucospermum on Museums Online South Africa

None available.