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Origin of name:
After Maurice Evans, pioneer collector in the KwaZulu-Natal Drakensberg.
Diagnostic characters:
Mat-formingGrey woolly plantMedium sized heads in compact inflorescenceBright yellow bracts
Description:
A mat-forming perennial herb, main stems up to 4 mm diam., older parts nude, younger densely clothed in greyish-white silky-woolly indumentum, stoloniferous, giving rise to numerous dwarf branches with closely rosetted leaves, flowering stems lateral, c. 30�50 mm long, leafy. Leaves spathulate-obovate, up to 45 x 15 mm, 3�5-nerved, apex rounded, base broad, half-clasping, both surfaces closely greyish-white woolly-felted, the upper surface sometimes merely cobwebby (but glandular) with age. Heads homogamous, c. 6�9 mm long, 3 mm across, subcylindric, many in a globose terminal cluster 20�30 mm across, their bases felted together with grey wool. Involucral bracts in c. 4 series, subequal, very loosely imbricate, about equaling the flowers, spreading at the top but not radiating, glossy, bright canary-yellow, the outermost sometimes brownish. Receptacle with pit margins slightly produced. Flowers 4�6, yellow. Achenes c. 1.5 mm, ellipsoid, obscurely ribbed, glabrous. Pappus bristles many, slightly flattened, tips subplumose, bases cohering lightly by patent cilia.
Stoloniferous grassland herb with a few radical leaves and tall scapes leafy only in the lower part.
Flowering from March to July.
Distribution:
Lesotho and KwaZulu-Natal Drakensberg, on the old Katberg Pass, on the road from Cathcart to Seymour, about 20 km NW of Gaika's Kop.
Grassland Biome.
Taxonomy:
Literature:
Helichrysum evansii Hilliard in Notes R. Bot. Gdn. Edinb. 43: 198 (1989).
Type:
Lectotype: KwaZulu-Natal, Drakensberg, summit Mont aux Sources, 11 000 ft, March 1898, Evans 742 (BOL, K, NH, PRE, isolecto.).
Synonym(s):
Helichrysum alticolum Bolus var. montana Bolus in Trans. S. Afr. Phil. Soc. 18: 386 (1907); Moeser in Bot. Jahrb. 44: 250 (1910); Hilliard, Compositae in Natal, 161 (1977).
Vouchers:
Phillipson 822; Marriott PRE22628.