Protea decurrens, also known as linear-leaf sugarbush, is a shrub of the genus Protea, in the Proteaceae family, which is endemic to the southwestern Cape Region of South Africa. It is a small shrub with a thick underground rootstock, this structure throwing up numerous leafy branches, upon the base of which clusters of flower heads may appear close to the ground. It is pollinated by rodents and grows in low-altitude fynbos or renosterveld. In the Afrikaans language it is known as the Overbergsesuikerbos. Taxonomy It was first described as a new species by Edwin Percy Phillips in 1910, but the plant was known long before Phillips. In the Prodromus of 1856, under the name Protea humilis, Carl Meissner is thought to have actually partially described this species (i.e. a synonym pro parte), based on the herbarium specimen he was using, which had recently been collected by the German explorer Karl Ludwig Philipp Zeyher. P. humiflora has a confused history. The plant had first been described by Henry Cranke Andrews using the spelling P. humiflora in his magazine The Botanists' Repository. In describing the plant, he made use of a living specimen blooming at the estate of the Protea collector George Hibbert, yet his illustration is somewhat confused in arrangement of the flower heads on the plant, showing a plant with the heads clustered on the stem near the ground and purplish in colour more like P. decurrens, where as the herbarium specimens of the same plant show this not to be the case. The seeds and specimens had first been collected by Francis Masson and one Drummond, and according to Stapf the Drummond specimen was actually P. decurrens. Spelled as P. humilis, it was described in Robert Brown's 1810 work in On the Proteaceae of Jussieu, with Andrews' older name designated a synonym and only the Masson specimen mentioned with regards to type. According to Meissner, by the mid-19th century, in horticultural collectors' circles, there were plants -possibly two or more species- which were grown, traded and sold under the name P. humifusa on the European continent, and he also reports Carl Ludwig Willdenow used the spelling P. humiflorens. Meissner in 1856 advocated the use of Brown's name, despite it being a homotypic synonym, a decision opposed by Phillips in 1910 and Stapf in 1912. Thus by the 1910s a P. humiflora was known to exist, and had been recollected