Southern daisy

Bellis sylvestris, commonly called southern daisy or wood daisy, is a perennial rosette-forming herb in the Asteraceae native to woodland clearings, pastures and damp meadows around the Mediterranean basin from Portugal and Morocco east to Turkey and the Caucasus. It closely resembles its better-known relative Bellis perennis (the common lawn daisy) but is generally larger and flowers from autumn through winter into spring rather than the warm season. Plants form a flat basal rosette of long-petiolate, obovate to spathulate, somewhat leathery leaves 3 to 8 centimetres long with shallowly toothed margins and sparse appressed hairs. Each flowering scape is leafless, slender, hairy and 10 to 30 centimetres tall, bearing a single solitary terminal head 2 to 4 centimetres across with numerous narrow white ray florets often tinged or streaked pink-purple on the underside, surrounding a centre of bright yellow disc florets above a hemispherical involucre of equal lanceolate green phyllaries. The fruit is a small flattened obovate achene without a pappus.