What is "gastrolobium"

n. any of various Australian evergreen shrubs of the genus Gastrolobium having whorled compound leaves poisonous to livestock and showy yellow to deep reddish-orange flowers followed by two-seeded pods [syn: poison bush, poison pea]

Gastrolobium is a genus of flowering plants in the family Fabaceae. There are over 100 species in this genus, and all but two are native to the south west region of Western Australia.

A significant number of the species accumulate monofluoroacetic acid - the key ingredient of the poison known commonly as 1080 which caused introduced/non native animal deaths from the 1840s in Western Australia. The controversy over the cause of the stock poisoning in that time involved the botanist James Drummond in a series of tests to ascertain the exact cause of the poisoning - which was determined to be caused primarily by the plants York Road poison (G. calycinum) and Champion Bay poison (G. oxylobioides).

In the 1930s and 1940s C.A. Gardner and H.W. Bennetts did considerable work identifying other species in Western Australia - leading to the publication of The Toxic Plants of Western Australia in 1956.