Olearia ramulosa

Olearia ramulosa, the twiggy daisy-bush, is a slender wiry evergreen shrub of the family Asteraceae growing 0.3-2 m tall and endemic to southern Australia from southern Queensland through New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia. The plant has many erect or arching, slender, much-branched stems that are usually densely clothed in short greyish or whitish appressed hairs. The small alternate or fascicled leaves are crowded on the branchlets, linear to narrowly oblong, 3-15 mm long and 1-3 mm wide, dark green above and white-tomentose beneath, with strongly recurved or rolled-back margins and a blunt to slightly notched tip. The flower heads are borne singly at the ends of short lateral branchlets, almost stalkless, 8-15 mm across, with an involucre of overlapping greenish bracts. Each capitulum has 5-15 white (occasionally pale mauve, pink or pale blue) strap-shaped ray florets surrounding a small central disc of yellow tubular florets. The fruit is a small ribbed silky-hairy cypsela bearing a pappus of fine barbellate bristles 3-5 mm long. It is widespread on heaths, mallee, dry sclerophyll forest and rocky slopes and flowers profusely from spring to autumn.