Photo: Greg Tasney, CC BY-SA 4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Possumwood

Quintinia sieberi

Also known as Possumwood, Sieber's Quintinia

At a glance

Family

Paracryphiaceae (an Australian rainforest tree historically placed in Escalloniaceae, and sometimes given its own small family, Quintiniaceae)

Type

Evergreen rainforest tree

Parts used

None traditionally used; this is an ornamental and habitat tree rather than a kitchen or medicine chest herb

Size

Small to medium tree, generally 8 to 20 meters tall, taller in sheltered gullies

Bloom

Small white to pale cream flowers in loose racemes, spring into early summer

Habitat

Cool temperate and subtropical rainforest margins and moist eucalypt forest of the New South Wales coast and ranges, extending into southern Queensland

Acquisition

Grow

This plant in HerbSense

Key benefits

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Feeds native possums and birds

Provides dense rainforest shade

Supports local wildlife habitat

Handsome year round foliage

Traditional uses

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Possumwood belongs to the quiet, unglamorous ranks of Australian rainforest trees that were never gathered for the medicine chest, only lived alongside. Its common name is a piece of bush folklore rather than pharmacy, said to come from the way brushtail and ringtail possums seek out its foliage and fruit through the forest canopy at night. Early settlers and bushmen in the NSW ranges would have known it simply as one of many mid-story rainforest trees filling out the gullies, valued more for holding the forest together than for any single use. Today it is grown chiefly by native plant enthusiasts who want to recreate a genuine patch of eastern rainforest and the wildlife that depends on it.

How to grow & use it

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✦Remedies & preparations
✦ Growing guide
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Pairs well with

✦Coachwood
✦Lilly Pilly
✦Sassafras

Substitutes

✦Other Quintinia species such as Quintinia verdonii
✦Coachwood for a similar rainforest canopy role

Choose it when

“For the shaded, leaf littered corner of a garden where a possum's dinner and a bird's shelter matter more than a harvest.”

Did you know?

The genus Quintinia was named to honor Jean-Baptiste de La Quintinie, the seventeenth century French gardener who designed the great kitchen garden at Versailles for Louis XIV, a quiet tribute carried all the way to the rainforests of eastern Australia.

Safety

Grown as an ornamental only; no part of this tree is eaten or used medicinally.