Walter Hood Fitch del. et lith. · Reeve, Benham & Reeve, London
Week of 7 September 2026
Black kangaroo paw
Part 2 of 6 in Daisies, primulas and the odd ones out
Macropidia fuliginosa (published as Anigozanthos fuliginosa)
A kangaroo paw dressed in black and lime-green velvet, the only species of its genus, from the sandplains north of Perth.
- Published
- Plate 4291, volume 73, 1847
- From
- Curtis's Botanical Magazine
- Drawn by
- Walter Hood Fitch
- Lithograph
- Walter Hood Fitch
- Technique
- Hand-coloured lithograph
- Family
- Haemodoraceae
- Native to
- Sandplains of south-western Western Australia
About the plant
Western Australia's kangaroo paws are odd enough, with their furry tubular flowers splayed into the shape of a marsupial's foot, but the black kangaroo paw is the strangest of the family. Its flowers are coated in branching hairs as black as soot over a skin of lime green, a colour scheme no other flower uses, and they stand on stems a metre high above a fan of grey-green leaves on the sandplains north of Perth. Honeyeaters, hunting the nectar, come away with pollen dusted on their foreheads.
It is the only member of its genus, separated from the other kangaroo paws (Anigozanthos) by the structure of the flower, and it has resisted gardeners everywhere else in the world: it wants deep white sand, dry summers, and the fungi of its own country. Plants raised at Kew in the 1840s, from seed sent by the colony's collectors, were among the first to flower in Europe, and Walter Hood Fitch drew one for this plate in 1847.
Its red-and-green relative, Anigozanthos manglesii, has been the floral emblem of Western Australia since 1960.
Bought together
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