Description:

• Perennial herbs or shrublets, sprawling, ascending or erect, stout, closely leafy throughout
• Leaves alternate, rigid, ascending, erect or appressed, imbricate, subulate to linear-lanceolate, often rounded abaxially, often long on vegetative shoots, short on flowering shoots, often bract-tipped below involucre, base broad, clasping, margins entire, strongly involute and hiding upper surface in long leaves, flat in short leaves, white-tomentose above (hair type B), glabrous and shining below
• Capitula discoid or disciform, broadly campanulate, large, often solitary at branch tips, or rarely 2 to several
• Involucral bracts in many rows, loosely imbricate, radiating, inner much exceeding florets, white, pink or yellow, outer sometimes pale dark brown; stereome divided
• Receptacle flat, epaleate, fimbrilliferous
• Flowers ± 85-315, 0-19 female; corolla of female flowers narrowly tubular or filiform; of bisexual flowers campanulate above, 5-lobed; all flowers glandular-hairy on backs of lobes
• Anthers ecalcarate, caudate, tails ± equalling filament collar; with lanceolate apical appendage; endothecial tissue polarised; staminodes often present in female flowers
• Style branches truncate and penicillate with obtuse sweeping hairs
• Cypselas either terete with myxogenic duplex hairs, or (E. pinifolia) flattened, winged, glabrous
• Pappus bristles shortly plumose above, barbellate below, fused at base in smooth ring, also cohering by small patent cilia

Nomenclature:

• Edmondia Cass.
  • Cassini: 75 (1818)
  • Hilliard & Burtt: 216 (1981)
  • Hilliard: 314 (1983)
  • Anderberg: 153 (1991)
  • Anderberg: 356 (1994)
• Aphelexis D.Don
  • Don: 546 (1826).
• Helipterum section Edmondia (Cass.) DC.
  • Candolle: 214 (1838).
• Helichrysum section Edmondia (Cass.) Harv.
  • Harvey: 219, 255 (1865)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa: Species 3, endemic, Western Cape