Helichrysum aureum

Helichrysum aureum, commonly the yellow everlasting or yellow mountain everlasting, is a variable soft perennial that reaches heights around 40 cm, occasionally double that but sometimes only 10 cm tall. The specific name, aureum, is a Latin word meaning golden, referring to the involucral bracts as they are coloured on most plants. Several ground-level leaf rosettes as well as many erect and leafy flowering stems may be grown.

The leaves are elliptic to obovate, often woolly-haired on both surfaces or only on the margins and midribs. Some glandular hairs occur on the blades. Stem leaves are smaller, narrow, pointed and ascending.

The flattened to spherical flowerheads grow solitary on the tall stems. The mostly golden-yellow and often glistening involucral bracts grow in several rows around the discs. A white form also occurs. Outer disc florets are female, the central ones bisexual. The heads are from 2 cm to 4,5 cm in diameter. Flowering happens almost all year round, not early in winter but more in spring and most of summer.

The species distribution is widespread in the east of the country, only missing from the Western Cape and the Northern Cape. It also grows in some neighbouring countries. The photo was taken in the KwaZulu-Natal Drakensberg.

The habitat is diverse, often grasslands and scrub in rocky places, but also thicket, sourveld and thornveld, from the coast to elevations around 3000 m. The habitat population is deemed of least concern early in the twenty first century (Manning, 2009; Pooley, 1998; Gledhill, 1981; iNaturalist; http://redlist.sanbi.org).