Origin of name:

poly = many, numerous
cladus = branch, shoots; referring to the many thin branches that grow from a central base

Diagnostic characters:

Cream-coloured bracts
Small compact inflorescences
Long fine needle-like leaves, sharply pointed

Description:

Bushy herb forming thick rounded clumps up to 1 m tall and as much across. Stems long, delicate, thin, sometimes tangled, woody, brittle, thinly greyish-white woolly, gland-dotted, closely leafy. Leaves mostly 7-22 x 1 (-2) mm or less, diminishing slightly upwards, linear-lanceolate, apex acuminate, mucronate, base broad, somewhat eared, margins revolute, upper surface more or less loosely white-woolly, often glabrescent, lower persistently loosely white-woolly, gland-dotted. Heads heterogamous, c. 3 x 1.5 mm, cylindric, some woolly hairs at base, many in compact corymbose panicles. Involucral bracts in 5 series, imbricate, graded, inner about equaling flowers, oblong-lanceolate, pellucid, tips subacute, opaque, dirty white, crisped, radiating. Receptacle with fimbrils much exceeding the ovaries. Flowers 9-15, 6-10 female, 1-5 homogamous. Achenes 0.5 mm, cylindric, obscurely ribbed, glabrous. Pappus bristles many, equaling corolla, scabridulous, bases cohering by patent cilia.

Flowering in March, April and May.

Distribution:

Favours rocky sites. Recorded from high ground in Limpopo (from the Blouberg and Soutpansberg south to the low Drakensberg on the Mpumalanga-KwaZulu-Natal border, and from Heidelberg, Johannesburg and Rustenburg on the Highveld), from the environs of Mbabane in Swaziland, and Itala near Louwsburg in northern KwaZulu-Natal. Also in the eastern highlands of Zimbabwe.

Grassland and Savanna Biomes.

Notes:

Easily recognized by its narrow leaves, small heads with white, crisped involucral bracts, and female versus homogamous flowers in the proportion 2-10: 1.

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Taxonomy:

Literature:

Helichrysum polycladum Klatt in Bull. Herbarium Boissier 4: 837 (1896); Moeser in Bot. Jb. 44: 281 (1910); Compton, Fl. Swaziland 634 (1976).

Type:

Limpopo, Mpome [Mparneberg fide Jl. S. Afr. Bot. 30: 135, 1964], Schlechter 4725 (Z, holo.; BM; BOL; G; GRA; PRE; S; iso.).

Synonym(s):

Vouchers:

Compton 27731 (NBG; PRE); Devenish 1695 (E; K; MO; NU); Esterhuysen 21449 (BOL; E; K; PRE); Hilliard & Burtt 10020 (E; K; M; MO; NU; PRE; S).