ASTERACEAE  

Annual or short-lived perennial herbs. Leaves opposite, crenate-serrate. Capitula radiate, glomerate or sometimes solitary. Involucral bracts few, in a single row. Receptacle with small, narrow paleae. Florets : rays female, yellow; disc florets 4-lobed, yellow. Anthers : appendages truncate to obtuse. Cypselas : ray cypselas elliptic, dorsiventrally compressed, with deeply lobate wings; disc cypselas clavate, tuberculate. Pappus in ray florets of 2 awns, connate to the wing; in disc florets of 2 or 3(4) awns.

Annual herbs. Leaves alternate, deeply pinnatisect. Capitula corymbose, homogamous, subglobose; involucral bracts in 4 or 5 rows; receptacle reticulo-foveolate. Florets bisexual, many, violet-purplish, glandular. Style branches subulate, hirsute. Cypselas obovoid, 4-sulcate, densely tuberculate. Pappus absent.

Perennial herbs. Leaves entire or mostly variously lobed-pinnatisect, usually ovate-cordate in outline. Capitula slender and rather few-flowered, often pendent, in corymbose to thyrsoid-paniculate, often elongate synflorescences. Florets violet, bluish, pink, purple, white, or rarely yellow; corolla glabrous. Cypselas terete to narrowly fusiform, 3- or 4-ribbed, glabrous and smooth or scabrid-hispid, not or hardly constricted below apex. Pappus of many stout, scabrid-barbellate bristles.

Annual herbs, or suffrutices with annual stems from a woody rootstock; vegetative indumentum of fine flagelliform hairs each consisting of an appressed filamentous terminal cell borne on a uniseriate many-celled stalk. Leaves alternate, narrowly oblanceolate to elliptic, somewhat discolorous, densely araneose-lanate on undersurface, gland-dotted. Capitula heterogamous, radiate, few to many, solitary and terminal on branches sometimes also subsessile along branches, subtended by leaf-like bracts. Phyllaries many, many-seriate, araneose-lanate to puberulous, at least outer ones subulate-aristate with stiff, squarrose or recurved apices, or lamina straight and pungent. Receptacle deeply alveolate; paleae absent. Rayflorets neuter, stamens and style absent or rudimentary, corollas deep red or creamy white; rays erect, 3-fid, inner lip wanting; ovary rudimentary, pappus of many narrow scales. Discflorets deep red or creamy white, bisexual and regular. Anthers : apical appendages narrowly triangular, theca bases sagittate with tapering-acute fimbriate or ciliolate tails. Style deeply 2-fid, apices subobtuse with a subdistal fringe of hairs. Cypselas subcylindric, 10-ribbed with many stiff white hairs; pappus several-seriate of many spreading narrowly lanceolate scales.