Gazania

Gazania is a genus of perennial more than annual herbs in the Asteraceae family. The usually tufted or creeping plants are short-stemmed and contain a milky latex.

The leaves are alternate or form rosettes, usually without distinct petioles. The leaf margins are entire or pinnately lobed. Lower leaf surfaces are usually white woolly.

The solitary flowerheads on distinct peduncles comprise both one row of sterile ray florets and numerous, fertile disc florets. The involucres are urn- or bell-shaped, the involucral bracts growing in many rows.

The strap-shaped ray florets have flattened tubes, hard to see at the bases of the elongated ray blades. There is often a blackish, brown or green marking at the base of each ray blade. These markings resemble and attract monkey-beetles, the main or important pollinators of flowers of the genus. The corollas are mostly yellow, orange or reddish.

The deeply five-lobed disc florets are bisexual, their lobes the same colour as the rays. The tiny disc floret anthers are arrow-shaped at the base, thread-like to pointed above. The styles are cylindrical with thickened upper parts, the branches linear to lanceolate.

The silky fruits (cypselas) are flask-shaped with rows of swollen cells. The pappus attached to each fruit usually consists of many hair-like scales.

There are 17 Gazania species, all occurring in Africa, mostly in southern Africa; 8 in the fynbos, 4 in the Little Karoo.

The Afrikaans common name gousblom derived from the Afrikaans (and Dutch) word goud meaning gold, refers to the bright yellow corollas, but many other Asteraceae flowerheads have yellow discs and some are also called gousblom. The other Afrikaans name for gazanias, viz. botterblom (butter flower), was earned by the flower taste, resembling butter.

Gazania plants are mostly palatable to stock and game. They are often found where the soil has been disturbed, so that abundance of these plants usually signals poor veld management.

The plant in picture is Gazania rigida (Leistner, (Ed.), 2000; Vlok and Schutte-Vlok, 2015; Manning, 2007).