Euchiton japonicus

Euchiton japonicus, commonly called creeping cudweed and formerly placed in Gnaphalium, is a small stoloniferous perennial herb of the family Asteraceae. The plant produces a flat rosette of narrowly oblanceolate to narrowly elliptic basal leaves 3 to 10 centimetres long, dark green on the upper surface and densely silvery-white woolly beneath, with a thinly pointed apex. From the centre of the rosette and from short leafy stolons it sends up one or several erect, slender, woolly flowering stems 5 to 30 centimetres tall, bearing a few much-reduced linear stem leaves. The inflorescence is a dense terminal cluster of small flower heads subtended by a ring of leafy bracts; each head is 3 to 5 millimetres long with several rows of straw-coloured to pale brown papery phyllaries and contains minute yellowish disc florets that are functionally either pistillate (outer) or perfect (inner). Flowering occurs mainly in spring. The fruit is a small, finely papillose cypsela with a deciduous pappus of fine bristles. It grows in damp grassland, lawns, forest clearings and open disturbed ground across temperate and subtropical Asia, Australasia and Pacific islands.