White-dogwood

Ozothamnus diosmifolius, commonly called rice flower or sago bush, is an erect, much-branched evergreen shrub in the family Asteraceae growing 1-3 m tall and endemic to eastern Australia from southern Queensland to southern New South Wales. The slender woody stems are clothed with crowded, alternate, linear to narrowly oblong leaves 4-15 mm long and 1-2 mm wide, dark green above, white-woolly beneath, with margins strongly recurved giving the foliage a heath-like appearance reminiscent of Diosma (hence the epithet). The plant flowers profusely from late spring into summer, producing dense flat-topped terminal corymbs 4-8 cm across composed of many small spherical button-like capitula 2-3 mm in diameter. Each head is enveloped in shining white, pale pink or rarely reddish papery involucral bracts that surround a few tiny cream tubular florets; the bracts persist after flowering and give the inflorescences their characteristic everlasting quality. The fruit is a small cypsela bearing a pappus of fine barbellate bristles. It grows in open eucalypt forest, sclerophyll woodland and disturbed roadsides on sandy or stony soils, and is cultivated commercially as a long-lasting cut flower.