Green-leaved Bramble (Rubus nebulosus)
© Tony Rodd
Lake Innes area, close to Port Macquarie, New South Wales. An endemic eastern Australian species of Rubus belonging to the small subgenus Micranthobatus of this large cosmopolitan genus. It is a high-climbing liana of rainforest and moist eucalypt forest, climbing by recurved prickles (a "grapple climber"). Unlike the introduced blackberries it is evergreen and does not have its shoots differentiated into primocanes and floricanes. Subgenus Micranthobatus (or should it be Lampobatus?) is primarily an east-Gondwanan group of 12 species, restricted to Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, the Philippines, eastern Indonesia, north-eastern India, and Madagascar (Kalkman, Flora Malesiana vol. 11-2 1993). Like the other subgenera of Rubus it was defined in Focke's 1910 monograph. Since then, there seems to have been little attempt made to advance understanding of the genus as a whole, though there has been more intensive study of species of many areas, in particular the cool northern-hemisphere blackberries and other brambles. But I just now googled on "rubus + cladistic" and discovered this Am J Bot article -- www.amjbot.org/cgi/content/full/86/1/81 -- which seems to completely upset the previously accepted basis of classification!
Photo taken on 2 Oct 2009