Asteraceae
The family Asteraceae, alternatively Compositae, consists of over 32,000 known species of flowering plants in over 1,900 genera within the order Asterales. Commonly referred to as the aster, daisy, composite, or sunflower family, Compositae ...
family of
flowering plant
Flowering plants are plants that bear flowers and fruits, and form the clade Angiospermae (), commonly called angiosperms. The term "angiosperm" is derived from the Greek words ('container, vessel') and ('seed'), and refers to those plants t ...
s. It comprises a single
tribe
The term tribe is used in many different contexts to refer to a category of human social group. The predominant worldwide usage of the term in English is in the discipline of anthropology. This definition is contested, in part due to confl ...
, Stifftieae, of ten
genera
Genus ( plural genera ) is a taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms as well as viruses. In the hierarchy of biological classification, genus comes above species and below family. In binomial nomenclat ...
.
These plants are vines, shrubs or small trees with thin to leathery, hairless of felty haired leaves with leaf stalks and entire margins, set alternately or rarely oppositely along the branches. The flower heads are at the tip of the branches or rarely in the axils of the leaves, on their own or in open to tightly packed cymes. The involucre may be narrowly cylindrical to half globular, and consists of at least three whorls of overlapping and gradually changing bracts. The common base of the florets (or receptacle) does not carry a bract (or palea) subtending each floret. The florets are all bisexual and may have either a
ligulate A ligule (from "strap", variant of ''lingula'', from ''lingua'' "tongue") is a thin outgrowth at the junction of leaf and leafstalk of many grasses (Poaceae) and sedges. A ligule is also a strap-shaped extension of the corolla, such as that of a r ...
corolla
Corolla may refer to:
*Corolla (botany), the petals of a flower, considered as a unit
*Toyota Corolla, an automobile model name
*Corolla (headgear)
A ''corolla'' is an ancient headdress in the form of a small circlet or crown.disk corolla, or a bilabiate corolla (three lobes merged to a strap with teeth at the tip and two lobes free much further down), and the lobes may be strongly coiled. The corolla can be yellow, orange, red, white, pink or purple. Like in all asterids, the
anthers
The stamen (plural ''stamina'' or ''stamens'') is the pollen-producing reproductive organ of a flower. Collectively the stamens form the androecium., p. 10
Morphology and terminology
A stamen typically consists of a stalk called the filam ...
are fused into a tube, though which the style grows, picking up the pollen that is discarded at the inside of the tube. The anthers have spurs at their base and appendages at their tip. The styles have hairless shafts and mostly hairless branches (sometimes with papillae at the outside). The one-seeded indehiscent fruits (called cypselas) are cylindrical and carry a pappus of many white, straw-colored or bright orange or pink bristles (which may be feather-like). figure 2 illustrates corolla types