Helichrysum

Annual or perennial herbs or shrublets, generally erect, sometimes prostrate, usually woolly or cobwebby, often glandular, rarely glabrous. Leaves alternate, straight, variously shaped, sessile or petiolate, often hairy, pilose to velutinous, margins entire, flat or sometimes revolute. Capitula disciform or discoid; cylindric, turbinate, campanulate, subglobose or depressed-globose, in terminal, loose, flat-topped corymbs or solitary. Involucralbracts in few to many rows; stereome usually fenestrated (divided); white, yellow, straw-coloured, brown, pink, purple, or red, sometimes a combination of colours; glabrous or hairy. Receptacle smooth, honeycombed or fimbrilliferous, flat, epaleate, rarely paleate. Marginalflorets female, fewer or sometimes more than central florets; corolla often narrowly tubular, sometimes with well-developed lamina, rarely filiform, yellow. Centralflorets bisexual; corolla funnel-shaped or tubular and then +/- campanulate above, lobes 5, hairs always present on backs of lobes, yellow. Anthers ecalcarate, caudate; with lanceolate apical appendages; endothecial tissue polarised. Style branches truncate, penicillate; stigmatic areas separated. Cypselas sparsely hairy with short, clavate, myxogenic hairs or with long nonmyxogenic hairs or glabrous; epidermis smooth or often papillose. Pappus of barbellate or subplumose bristles, generally in 1 row; bristles basally with or without patent cilia, apical cells clavate or not. x = 7 (4, 5, 6, 8, 13) (aneuploids, high polyploidy).