page_title: Kingia
section_title: Uses
hierarchical_section_title: Kingia / Uses
caption_attribution_description: Photograph illustrating source, removed caption in title of image. Categorised by the systematic name given in text, or current synonym in taxonomy at commons.
context_page_description: Kingia is a genus consisting of a single species, Kingia australis, and belongs to the plant family Dasypogonaceae. It has a thick pseudo-trunk consisting of accumulated leaf-bases, with a cluster of long, slender leaves on top. The trunk is usually unbranched, but can branch if the growing tip is damaged. Flowers occur in egg-shaped clusters on the ends of up to 100 long curved stems. Kingia grows extremely slowly, the trunk increasing in height by about 1½ centimetres per year. It can live for centuries, however, so can attain a substantial height; 400-year-old plants with a height of six metres are not unusual.
context_section_description: The tree was identified by the state's conservator of forests, Charles Lane Poole, as being high in cellulose and exploited for a fibre industry. These fibres were used to make brooms and brushes, either course and long wearing street brooms or for more delicate purposes; Poole notes that these fibres were preferred by those employed as streetsweepers in Perth and Melbourne. The fibres were crudely processed from a layer of the material found throughout the trunk of the plant. This was separated from the soft core, dried to loosen the adhesion between them, and mechanically split and guillotined to lengths that were baled up for export.
  The name of the genus, Kingia, was adopted for the title of the Western Australian Herbarium's publication of their research notes.
caption: Woodcutter alongside a stand of kingia.
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