Cotula

The Cotula genus consists of annual herbs or creeping perennials. The leaves are usually alternate, in some species only growing in a rosette at the plant base. Some have leaves with entire margins, others with margins twice incised into narrow lobes.

Button-like flowerheads, often yellow, grow solitary on usually long, erect peduncles well above the leaves. The wiry stalks are sometimes leafy, often not. The head has two rows of green bracts at the base of its compact structure in a bell-shaped to semi-spherical involucre. The receptacle is flat or conical, often toothed.

The flowerheads mostly have only disc florets, densely clustered in a shallow dome-shape. When white or yellow ray florets are present, surrounding the discs in one or a few rows, they are always female. Species with rays and leafless peduncles sometimes swell at the top in fruit, while some discoid species with leafy peduncles do not display the swelling. The tiny disc florets are yellow, four-lobed (occasionally three-lobed) and bisexual or sometimes male. The usually stalked fruits are flat and elliptic without a pappus.

The genus has about 55 species occurring in Africa, Australia and South America; 43 of them in southern Africa.

This yellow-flowering plant with divided, hairy, greyish leaves and conspicuously hairy peduncle was seen in Namaqualand during August (Manning, 2007; Leistner, (Ed.), 2000).