It has greyish or green narrow or broad inverted egg-shaped leaves with three to ten teeth near the tip and large yellow flowerheads, with firm, bent, yellow styles that stick far beyond the rest of the flower and give the impression of a pincushion.

[2] L. conocarpodendron is an evergreen large shrub of 3–5 m (9.8–16.4 ft) high and 3–6 m (9.8–19.7 ft) in diameter with a rounded crown, which is rigid because of the thick branching at approximately right angles, and with a firm trunk of 15–40 cm (5.9–15.7 in) in diameter that is covered by 3–5 cm (1.2–2.0 in) thick greyish, reddish or blackish bark with a netting of fissures.

The style is stout, 1–1½ mm (0.04–0.06 in) thick and 4½–5½ cm (1.8-2.2 in) long, at first bent towards the center of the flower head but getting more straight with age.

[2] The subtribe Proteinae, to which the genus Leucospermum has been assigned, consistently has a basic chromosome number of twelve (2n=24).

conocarpodendron) has felty hairy leaves due to a dense cover of fine crisped hairs, while the green tree pincushion or groenkreupelhout (subsp.

At one location, on the east side of Little Lion's Head near Mount Rhodes, a hybrid swarm between both subspecies is found, where individual plants may have hairiness anywhere between that of both parents.

[2] The earliest known description of the species we now know as Leucospermum conocarpodendron was by Paul Hermann in Paradisus Batavus, a book describing the plants of the Hortus Botanicus Leiden (botanical garden of the Leyden university), that was published in 1689, three years after his death.

He called it Salix conophora Africana (African cone-bearing willow), based on his observation of Leucospermum conocarpodendron on the lower slopes of the Table Mountain.

In the following six decades, several other descriptions were published, such as by Leonard Plukenet, James Petiver, John Ray and Herman Boerhaave.

Names published before 1753, the year that was chosen as a starting point for the binominal nomenclature proposed by Carl Linnaeus, are not valid however.

The tree pincushion was first validly described in the first edition of Species Plantarum as Leucadendron conocarpodendron by Linnaeus in 1753.

Richard Anthony Salisbury created two superfluous names, Protea tortuosa in 1796 and Leucadendrum crassicaule in 1809.

In addition, it occurs from the upper Berg River Valley, via Pringle Bay and Hermanus to Stanford.

[2] Both subspecies have some resistance for the wildfires that occur in the fynbos every one or two decades, because the trunk is covered by a thick bark.

After the fire has burnt away the soft parts, regrowth takes place from the tip of the higher branches.

[2] Seed dispersal and survival greatly depends on the symbiosis of many Proteaceae with native ant species, in particular Anoplolepis steingroeveri and Pheidole capensis, that carry the fruits to their underground nests, where the elaiosome is eaten, leaving a slick and hard seed underground, safe from consumption by rodents and birds and overhead fires.

Due to the proximity of housing areas, wildfires in its range are suppressed and so allow the fynbos to develop into a thicket less suitable for the grey tree pincushion, causing the fires when they eventually occur to be hotter because of more biomass, which results in more plants dying.