Description:

• Woody plants usually stunted due to growing in rock crevices; main stems usually firmly anchored in crevice, with many secondary and tertiary branches, often appearing one-sided on specimens; very old plants may develop a woody base with many buds and dead stems; new growth white-woolly, greying with age; secondary stems branching copiously from below capitulum of previous season, woolly-hairy; branches foliaceous throughout
• Leaves small, scale-like, tightly appressed, not more than 2 mm long and just as wide, surface appearing shiny, very densely glandular
• Capitula discoid, solitary or 2-4 terminal on branches, 24-28-flowered, spreading funnel-shaped from a narrow base
• Involucral bracts 48-52, in several rows, white, not translucent, reflexed in upper third, tips opaque, milky-white
• Receptacle flat, honeycombed
• Flowers tubular, ± 3.5 mm long, scarcely widening at tip, lobes pilose outside, often reddish
• Anthers basally tailed, apical appendages acuminate
• Style bifid, basally swollen, branches slightly rounded
• Nectary 0
• Cypsela very densely hairy with twin hairs, hairs white, straight, with 5 narrow ribs
• Pappus of 18-24 flattened bristles, fused in a ring at base, barbed to shortly plumose throughout, hairs fused into a flat tip with hair apices rounded and inflated

Nomenclature:

• Dolichothrix Hilliard & B.L.Burtt
  • Hilliard & Burtt: 221 (1981)
  • Anderberg: 71 (1991)
  • Anderberg: 331 (1994)

Distribution & Notes:

• Southern Africa: Monotypic: Dolichothrix ericoides (Lam.) Hilliard & B.L.Burtt endemic to Western and Eastern Cape