grass tree

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun Any of several woody-stemmed Australian plants of the genus Xanthorrhoea, having stiff grasslike leaves and a spike of small white flowers that emerge after fire.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• An Australian plant of the genus Xanthorrhœa, having a thick trunk crowned with a dense tuft of pendulous, grasslike leaves, from the center of which arises a long stem, bearing at its summit a dense flower spike looking somewhat like a large cat-tail. These plants are often called “blackboys” from the large trunks denuded and blackened by fire. They yield two kinds of fragrant resin, called Botany-bay gum, and Gum Acaroides.
• A similar Australian plant (Kingia australis).

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun An Australian plant of the genus Xanthorrhoea, having a thick trunk crowned with a dense tuft of pendulous, grass-like leaves, from whose centre arises a long stem, bearing at its summit a dense flower spike looking somewhat like a large cat-tail.
• noun A similar Australian plant (Kingia australis).

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun gaunt Tasmanian evergreen shrubby tree with slender tapering leaves 3 to 5 feet long
• noun elegant tree having either a single trunk or a branching trunk each with terminal clusters of long narrow leaves and large panicles of fragrant white, yellow or red flowers; New Zealand
• noun any of several Australian evergreen perennials having short thick woody stems crowned by a tuft of grasslike foliage and yielding acaroid resins