Clustered everlasting

Chrysocephalum semipapposum, commonly known as clustered everlasting or yellow buttons, is an erect woody-based perennial herb in the family Asteraceae native to much of southern and eastern Australia, including all mainland states, where it occurs in open eucalypt woodlands, grasslands, dry sclerophyll forest understorey and roadside verges from coastal habitats to subalpine elevations. The plant grows 30 to 90 centimetres tall in clumps from a rhizomatous rootstock, with many slender, erect, leafy stems that are clothed in a grey to whitish cottony-woolly tomentum together with the foliage. The alternate stem leaves are linear to narrowly oblong or oblanceolate, 1.5 to 6 centimetres long and 1 to 6 millimetres wide, with entire, often slightly revolute margins, deep green and sparsely cobwebby above and densely white-tomentose beneath. Numerous small bright golden-yellow flower heads 4 to 8 millimetres across are crowded into dense flat-topped terminal corymbs at the stem tips; each head consists wholly of small disk florets enclosed by an involucre of pale golden papery bracts. Flowering is profuse and prolonged from late spring through summer, attracting many native insect pollinators.