Metalasia

Metalasia, commonly known in Afrikaans as blombos (flower bush), is a genus of mostly single-stemmed shrublets or shrubs with greyish woolly branches in the Asteraceae or daisy family.

The leaves are alternate, often of two sizes as tufts of smaller new leaves are usually present in the axils of older leaves. The leaf-shape is mostly needle-like, many with sharply pointed tips. The stalkless, leathery leaves are often twisted with margins rolled in. The upper surface of the leaf is often white-woolly in the groove visible between the margins, the lower surface (sometimes shown above from the twisting), dark green or dull green and (about) hairless.

The genus is easy to recognise, the species hard to differentiate. The leaves are important in species identification, as is the number of heads per inflorescence.

Each flowerhead bears a few disc florets, usually from three to eight and never any ray florets. The small flowerheads are densely clustered umbel-like at stem-tips and sessile, rarely solitary. The cylindrical to bell-shaped involucres comprise four to six rows of bracts. The inner row usually has dry, papery tips coloured white, pink or yellow. The receptacle at the base of the involucre has no scales.

The florets are bisexual, sometimes sterile, their tubes each ending in five lobes. The anthers are tailed, the style linear, swollen at its base. The elliptic fruit may be smooth or warty, ending in a pappus of many bristles with swollen tips.

There are 52 species of Metalasia, all in the fynbos and 47 of them in the Western Cape. The flowers are traded as fillers and sometimes put on graves (Leistner, (Ed.), 2000; Vlok and Schutte-Vlok, 2015; Manning 2007).