Baccharis latifolia

Baccharis latifolia, known across the Andes as chilca, is an evergreen shrub of the Asteraceae native to the highlands of South America from Colombia and Venezuela through Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and northern Argentina, where it grows in disturbed open ground, riverbanks, roadsides, and fallow Andean valleys between roughly 1500 and 3500 m elevation. Plants reach 1.5-4 m tall, with much-branched, glabrous to slightly viscid stems and a strongly resinous, balsamic odour when bruised. The alternate leaves are sessile or shortly petiolate, broadly ovate to lanceolate, 4-10 cm long, with three prominent palmate veins from the base and coarsely serrate margins; both surfaces are punctate with sticky resin glands. The species is dioecious: staminate and pistillate flowers are borne on separate individuals in dense terminal corymbose panicles of small discoid capitula. Each capitulum bears whitish to cream-coloured tubular florets surrounded by an involucre of imbricate dry bracts. Pistillate plants produce numerous tiny ribbed achenes topped by a copious white pappus of capillary bristles that gives fruiting plants a fluffy, cotton-like appearance.