Leontodon incanus

Leontodon incanus, the grey hawkbit, is a perennial herb in the Asteraceae family native to the mountains of central and southeastern Europe, occurring from the eastern Alps and the Apennines through the Carpathians and Dinaric ranges to the western Balkans, with its strongholds in Austria, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia. It grows in dry calcareous grasslands, rocky slopes, screes and open dolomitic pastures in the montane to subalpine zones. The plant arises from a stout vertical rhizome bearing a basal rosette of leaves and produces several leafless flowering scapes 10 to 30 centimetres tall. The basal leaves are oblanceolate to narrowly obovate, 3 to 12 centimetres long, with sinuate-dentate to pinnatifid margins and a covering of soft greyish hairs that give the species its specific epithet incanus, meaning 'hoary'. Each scape bears a solitary, terminal, golden-yellow flower head 2 to 3 centimetres across composed entirely of ligulate florets, the outer ligules sometimes reddish on the back; involucral bracts are imbricate and pubescent. The fruit is a beaked, longitudinally ribbed achene 5 to 7 millimetres long crowned by a feathery, plumose pappus of equal length, adapted for wind dispersal.