Protea burchellii, also known as Burchell's sugarbush, is a flowering shrub in the genus Protea, which is endemic to the southwestern Cape Region of South Africa. The shrub is known by the vernacular name of blinksuikerbos in the Afrikaans language. Taxonomy Protea burchellii was described by Otto Stapf in the Flora Capensis in 1912. Although Stapf was unaware of it at the time, the species had in fact been described in other works over a century before him, but under the name P. pulchella or some of its synonyms. The species P. burchellii had first been described just before the turn of the 18th century under the name P. pulchella by Henry Cranke Andrews in his magazine The Botanists' Repository, however this name was illegitimate, because it had already been used a few years before in 1796 by Heinrich Schrader and Johann Christoph Wendland for a plant that was growing in the Royal Gardens of Hanover in what is now Germany, which in Robert Brown's 1810 work On the Proteaceae of Jussieu was moved to Petrophile pulchella. Nonetheless, Andrews' Protea pulchella lived on. Richard Anthony Salisbury moved it to Erodendrum pulchellum in the notorious 1809 On the cultivation of the plants belonging to the natural order of Proteeae published under the name of Joseph Knight, much later Otto Kuntze moved it to Scolymocephalus pulchellus in 1891, although his Protea reclassification was soon rejected. Edwin Percy Phillips described a P. pulchella var. undulata, also known as variety β, for a plant with leaves with undulating margins, and then Stapf described a P. subpulchella in 1925. Type Stapf designated a specimen collected by the English explorer William John Burchell numbered 8332 as the holotype. It was collected somewhere between Sir Lowry's Pass and Jonkers Hoek, in the area of Stellenbosch, at the very end of March, 1815. Burchell had in fact collected a type series, according to the South African botanist John Patrick Rourke, and thus in 1978 accordingly designated one of the two specimen sheets labelled as Burchell8332 housed at the Kew Herbarium as the lectotype; this specific sheet had originally been part of Burchell's personal herbarium, and had been donated to Kew upon his death by his widow in 1865. Etymology The specific epithet commemorates the collector of the type specimens, William Burchell. Description The plant takes the form of a spreading, evergreen, multi-branched shrub. It grows one or two,