FoI
Butterfly-Bush Golden Cudweed
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Butterfly-Bush Golden Cudweed
P Native Photo: C. Rajasekar
Common name: Butterfly-Bush Golden Cudweed
Botanical name: Helichrysum buddleioides    Family: Asteraceae (Sunflower family)
Synonyms: Gnaphalium buddleioides, Gnaphalium cynoglossoides

Butterfly-Bush Golden Cudweed is a shrub or undershrub, up to 4 m tall, sometimes scrambling; stems greyish white woolly. Leaves are ovate-lanceshaped, base nearly stem-clasping, pointed-tapering or blunt and sometimes hooked at tip, margins recurved, 1-7 x 0.5-2 cm, upper surface hairless or sparsely woolly hairy, lower surface with dense white or cottony tomentum, 3-7 nerved. Flower-heads are borne in dense corymbs at branch-ends, in spherical clusters, 2-2.5 mm across. Flower-cluster-stalks are very small, 0.2-1 mm long, densely woolly woolly. Involucral bracts are pale yellow, 4-many-seriate, enveloped in woolly tomentum; outer obovate, brown at base; inner inverted-lanceshaped, brown at basal end. Ray florets female, with thread-like flower, 1 - 2.5 mm long, obscurely or 4 toothed. nisc florets bisexual, with flower 1 - 2 mm long, 5-toothed. Achenes about 0.3 mm long. Pappus hairs are white. Butterfly-Bush Golden Cudweed is found on Deccan Plateau, up to 2500 m elevation, in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, and Sri Lanka. Flowering: March.

Identification credit: Premkumar M. Photographed in Kalakkad-Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve, Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu.

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