Erica unicolor subsp. mutica buds ready to open

The elongated and nearly open buds of Erica unicolor subsp. mutica still have converging lobe tips in the photo. Angled inwards on the otherwise cylindrical and nearly straight tubes, the lobes are coloured a similar lemon yellow as the upper quarter of the perianth. The rest of the tube on this plant is cerise-orange, commonly pink in the subspecies.

It is hard to separate sepals and bracts from stem-tip leaves on this plant, all of them similarly shaped, notably hairy and about continually distributed between flower and stem. The sepals do not adhere to the corolla in picture.

The short-haired upper stem is whitish under the ascending, open-backed leaves that form precise, vertical arrays (Bond and Goldblatt, 1984; iNaturalist).