Calocephalus citreus

Calocephalus citreus Less. (Asteraceae), lemon beauty-heads or yellow billy-buttons, is a tufted perennial herb 15-50 cm tall, native to grasslands and open woodlands of southeastern Australia, including Victoria, New South Wales, Tasmania and parts of South Australia. It grows from a slender woody rootstock that produces several erect, slender, white-cottony flowering stems. The leaves are linear to narrowly linear, 1-5 cm long and less than 2 mm wide, mostly basal, sessile, with a thin grey-white tomentum and inrolled margins giving them a wiry appearance. The inflorescence is a compact terminal globular compound head 8-15 mm across, composed of many small cylindric capitula clustered tightly together; each capitulum bears 1-3 tubular bisexual disc florets surrounded by straw-coloured papery involucral bracts that give the head its characteristic bright lemon-yellow colour. Achenes are small, cylindric and crowned with a pappus of fine plumose bristles. The species is locally declining due to grassland loss.