Rosy pussytoes

Antennaria rosea, the rosy pussytoes or rose pussytoes, is a low mat-forming perennial herb of the family Asteraceae growing 8-40 cm tall from creeping stoloniferous rootstocks, widely distributed across western and northern North America from Alaska and Yukon south through the Rocky Mountains to California, New Mexico and the northern Great Plains. The plant forms dense silvery-grey patches of basal leaf rosettes; the basal leaves are narrowly spatulate to oblanceolate, 1-3 cm long, single-veined and densely clothed on both surfaces with felt-like silvery-white tomentum that gives the plant its overall hoary appearance. Slender erect flowering stems are also white-tomentose and bear several reduced, linear, alternate stem leaves. The inflorescence is a compact terminal corymb of 3-15 small flower heads. Each capitulum is 5-8 mm high and most distinctively has dry papery involucral bracts that are bright rose-pink, raspberry-pink or occasionally white at the tip, surrounding a small head of tubular yellowish-white disc florets. The species is largely apomictic and is often functionally pistillate. The fruit is a tiny cypsela bearing a pappus of slender capillary bristles. It grows on dry meadows, rocky alpine slopes, sagebrush flats and forest openings.