Variable daisy

Brachyscome ciliaris, the variable daisy or hairy cut-leaf daisy, is a small tufted perennial herb of the family Asteraceae growing 8-30 cm tall and endemic to mainland Australia, occurring in all states except Tasmania across drier inland regions. The plant forms a low cushion or clump from a slender taproot, sending up many slender ascending or decumbent flowering stems that are clothed in glandular and simple short hairs. The leaves are mostly basal and lower-cauline, alternate, 1-5 cm long, narrowly oblanceolate to pinnately lobed with 3-9 narrow linear lobes, somewhat fleshy, often glandular and ciliate along the margins as the epithet suggests. Each flowering stem terminates in a single daisy-like flower head 1.5-3 cm across borne on a long slender peduncle. The involucre is hemispheric with 2-3 series of green herbaceous bracts edged with translucent membranous margins. Each capitulum has 15-30 broad strap-shaped ray florets that are white, pale mauve, lilac or blue surrounding a small central disc of bright yellow tubular florets. The fruit is a small flattened obovate cypsela with thickened margins and a minute or absent pappus. The species is morphologically very variable and occupies a wide range of mallee, mulga, grassland and woodland habitats on sandy and stony soils.