Description:

• 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
• Involucral bracts 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
• Marginal florets female, fewer or sometimes more than central florets; corolla often narrowly tubular, sometimes with well-developed lamina, rarely filiform, yellow
• Central florets 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)

Nomenclature:

• Helichrysum Mill.
  • Miller: [462] (1754)
  • Persoon: 414 (1807) name conserved
  • Hilliard: 61 (1983)
  • Anderberg: 141 (1991)
  • Anderberg: 358 (1994)
• Achyrocline (Less.) DC.
  • Hilliard & Burtt: 201 (1981)
  • Hilliard: 59 (1983)
  • Mesfin Tadesse & Reilly: 379 (1995).
• Leontonyx Cass.
  • Cassini: 466 (1822)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 600, largely Africa and Madagascar, also Europe, Asia and Australia
• Southern Africa: Species 244, widely distributed