Lavender cotton

Santolina chamaecyparissus is a low evergreen aromatic subshrub of the Asteraceae family forming dense compact rounded mounds 30-60 cm tall and as wide, with woody branching basal stems and densely leafy, silvery-white ascending shoots clothed throughout in a fine felted tomentum. The leaves are alternate, sessile, narrowly oblong to linear in outline, 2-4 cm long and 4-8 mm wide, pinnately divided into very many short cylindrical to subglobose toothlike segments only 1-2 mm long arranged in four ranks along the rachis, giving the foliage a coral- or coniferous-cypress-like texture (whence the epithet chamaecyparissus, 'ground cypress'). The whole plant emits a strong camphoraceous-aromatic odour when bruised. Flowering shoots arise as unbranched leafless peduncles 10-25 cm long, each terminated by a single hemispherical to globose discoid flower head 8-15 mm across. The involucre is composed of imbricate woolly bracts; all florets are tubular, bright golden-yellow, 4-5 mm long, with no ray florets. The fruit is a small angular glabrous cypsela about 1.5 mm long, without a pappus. Native to the western Mediterranean on dry rocky garrigue, limestone slopes and stabilised dunes, and widely cultivated as an ornamental edging plant.