Field cotton-rose

Filago arvensis, the field cotton-rose or field cudweed, is a small annual herb in the family Asteraceae native to Europe, North Africa, and temperate Asia, and naturalized in parts of North America. It is a characteristic plant of sandy arable fields, fallow ground, calcareous and acid open grassland, dry roadside verges, and recently disturbed soil. The plant grows as a slender erect to slightly branched stem 5-30 cm tall, the whole surface densely clothed in a thick whitish-grey woolly indumentum that gives the species its cottony appearance and its specific epithet. Leaves are alternate, linear-lanceolate to narrowly oblanceolate, 1-2.5 cm long, sessile and entire, and uniformly woolly on both surfaces. The flowering heads are very small (2-3 mm), tubular, and clustered in dense terminal and axillary glomerules of 2-7 heads, the whole cluster overtopped by leafy bracts in a corymbose arrangement, characteristic of the genus. Each head contains a few inconspicuous female filiform florets and one or two hermaphrodite disc florets, surrounded by an involucre of woolly chaffy bracts. The achenes are tiny, ellipsoid, and bear a short pappus of fine bristles in some florets but lack one in the marginal florets.