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General: Perennial herb from a fibrous-rooted short, horizontal to ascending rhizome; stems erect, solitary, simple, glabrous or sparsely to moderately long-hairy with whitish multicellular hairs, 10-30 cm tall.
Leaves: Basal leaves egg-shaped to rounded or kidney-shaped, long-stalked, 1.5-10 cm long including the stalk, 1-3 cm wide, glabrous to sparsely long-hairy or stiff-hairy, sometimes from short separate shoots; lower stem leaves similar, glabrous to conspicuously white woolly-hairy in the leaf axils, becoming reduced and few-lobed or entire upwards.
Flowers: Heads with ray and disk flowers, solitary, with stalks glabrous or sparsely to moderately woolly-hairy with whitish multicellular hairs; involucres 5-12 mm tall; involucral bracts oblanceolate, green, margins translucent and jagged to fringed with small hairs above, hairy at the tips; bracteoles few, inconspicuous or lacking; ray flowers yellow, mostly 7-16 mm long; disk flowers yellow.
Fruits: Achenes oblong, ribbed, glabrous; pappus of white hairlike bristles.
Notes: This species has recently been moved to Sinosenecio from Senecio. The microcharacters separating our species of Sinosenecio from other Senecio in our flora are the uniform entire stigmatic areas and the cylindric stamen filaments of the "tussalaginoid lineage" and also the thickenings in the transverse walls of the endothecial cells, i.e., the thickenings are "polarized" (Janovec & Barkley 1996). In addition, the chromosome number of this species is n = 24, a number not known among Senecio. This use of microcharacters runs counter to our overall taxonomic concept of a practical flora, but since all other North American treatments will follow this treatment we will as well.
Source: The Illustrated Flora of British Columbia
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