Heads many-flowered, diœcious; flowers all tubular; pistillate corollas very slender. Involucre dry and scarious, white or colored, imbricated. Receptacle convex or flat, not chaffy. Anthers caudate. Achenes terete or flattish; pappus a single row of bristles, in the fertile flowers capillary, united at base so as to fall in a ring, and in the sterile thickened and club-shaped or barbellate at the summit.—Perennial white-woolly herbs, with entire leaves and corymbed (rarely single) heads. Corolla yellowish. (Name from the resemblance of the sterile pappus to the antennæ of certain insects.)
1. A. plantaginifòlia, Hook. (Plantain-leaved Everlasting.) Spreading by offsets and runners, low (3–18´ high); leaves silky-woolly when young, at length green above and hoary beneath; those of the simple and scape-like flowering stems small, lanceolate, appressed; the radical obovate or oval-spatulate, petioled, ample, 3-nerved; heads in a small crowded corymb; scales of the (mostly white) involucre obtuse in the sterile, and acutish and narrower in the fertile plant.—Sterile knolls and banks; common. March–May.
32. ANÁPHALIS, DC. Everlasting.
Characters as of Antennaria, but the pappus in the sterile flowers not thickened at the summit or scarcely so, and that of the fertile flowers not at all united at base; fertile heads usually with a few perfect but sterile flowers in the centre. (Said to be an ancient Greek name of some similar plant.)
1. A. margaritàcea, Benth. & Hook. (Pearly Everlasting.) Stem erect (1–2° high), corymbose at the summit, with many heads, leafy; leaves broadly to linear-lanceolate, taper-pointed, sessile, soon green above; involucral scales pearly-white, very numerous, obtuse or rounded, radiating in age. (Antennaria margaritacea, R. Br.)—Dry hills and woods, common northward. Aug. (N. E. Asia.)
33. GNAPHÀLIUM, L. Cudweed.
Heads many-flowered; flowers all tubular, the outer pistillate and very slender, the central perfect. Scales of the involucre dry and scarious, white or colored, imbricated in several rows. Receptacle flat, naked. Anthers caudate. Achenes terete or flattish; pappus a single row of capillary rough bristles.—Woolly herbs, with sessile or decurrent leaves, and clustered or corymbed heads; fl. in summer and autumn. Corolla whitish or yellowish. (Name from γνάφαλον, a lock of wool, in allusion to the floccose down.)
§ 1. GNAPHALIUM proper. Bristles of the pappus distinct.
1. G. polycéphalum, Michx. (Common Everlasting.) Erect, woolly annual (1–3° high), fragrant; leaves lanceolate, tapering at the base, with undulate margins, not decurrent, smoothish above; heads clustered at the summit of the panicled-corymbose branches, ovate-conical before expansion, then obovate; scales (whitish) ovate and oblong, rather obtuse; perfect flowers few.—Old fields and woods; common.
2. G. decúrrens, Ives. (Everlasting.) Stout, erect (2° high), annual or biennial, branched at the top, clammy-pubescent, white-woolly on the branches, bearing numerous heads in dense corymbed clusters; leaves linear-lanceolate, partly clasping, decurrent; scales yellowish-white, oval, acutish.—Hillsides, N. J. and Penn. to Maine, Mich., Minn., and northward.