3–3½ cm long, yellow, orange or crimson in color. The cylindric perianth tube is hairless and . The three periant lobes at the side of the centre of the flowerhead remain united and form a hairless, rolled sheath, except for some rigid hairs on the margins. The lobe facing towards the rim of the flowerhead is free. The anthers are ovate and sit atop a long filament. The style is 4½–6 cm (1.8–2.4 in) long, sticking out horizontally but curving upwards near the obliquely shell-shaped pollen presenter, with a flattened tip that also contains an oblique groove that functions as the stigma. Subtending the ovary are four awl-shaped scales of about long. The subtribe Proteinae, to which the genus Leucospermum has been assigned, consistently has a basic chromosome number of twelve (2n=24). Differences with related species The ornamental pincushion can be distinguished by its spreading habit, with horizontal branches, leaf-shapes that range from oblong with teeth in the earliest growth of the season to entire and oval closer to the flower heads. The flower heads are generally at a right angle to the branch it grows from, on the peranth lobes are only some soft hairs and the pollen presenter has a skewed shell shape. The closely related L. patersonii is more tree-like, with larger, less variable, broadly oblong leaves that consistently have three to eight teeth near the tip, woolly perianth lobes and upright flower heads. Taxonomy In 1809, Joseph Knight published a book titled On the cultivation of the plants belonging to the natural order of Proteeae, that contained an extensive revision of the Proteaceae attributed to Richard Anthony Salisbury. Salisbury was the first to describe the ornamental pincushion and named it Leucadendrum cordifolium. In 1900 however, his generic names were suppressed in favour of those proposed by Robert Brown. Robert Brown called the species Leucospermum nutans in 1810. In 1841, the French botanist Jean Poiret moved the species and made the combination Protea nutans. Otto Kuntze moved the species again, now to his genus Leucadendron, making the combination Leucadendron nutans in 1891. Kuntze's genus however is a later synonym of Leucospermum by Brown, and a later homonym of Leucadendron as proposed by Linnaeus. The species name proposed by Salisbury is the earliest and was not suppressed unlike his genus name. Edwin Percy Phillips described a slightly different form in 1910 and called it Leucospermum mixtum, while a