Leptinella pusilla

Detailed description

Dioecious, creeping, tufted perennial herb of open ground and grassland. Rhizomes deeply buried, pale, wiry and glabrous; branches uncommon, usually single at flowering nodes; initially clade in spirally arranged scales set 5–20 mm apart. Short shoots growing upward from buried rhizomes, each apically bearing 4-8 tufted leaves. Roots slender, weak, 0.5 mm diameter. Leaves 1-pinnatifid, 10–60 × 3–10 mm; blade 5–30 mm long, light green usually with proximal or all pinnae heavily brown-pigmented, lanceolate to obovate, submembranous, glabrous to densely villous hairy, midrib raised along most of ventral surface; pinnae 8–15 pairs, usually distant, sometimes overlapping, cut to rhachis, oblong or obovate; teeth absent or up to 8 per pinna, on distal margins only, usually obscured by hairs, cut ¼–½ across pinna, narrowly triangular, acute to acuminate, sometimes with a terminal weft of hairs. Peduncles villous about equal in length to leaves, 10–30 mm, ebracteate or bearing 1 simple bract. Pistillate capitula 2–4 mm extending to 8 mm diameter in fruit; surface convex, involucre urceolate; involucral bracts 15–30, unequally 3-, or more seriate, broadly elliptic, green, more or less villous with a broad, usually brown tipped, scarious margin; inner bracts elongated after anthesis to enclose subglobose fruiting head; florets 25–80, 2 mm long, curved, yellow-green; corolla slightly longer than wide, dentition unequal. Staminate heads 3–5 mm diameter; involucre hemispherical, involucral bracts 5–10, subequally uni-, or biseriate, not extending after anthesis; florets similar but slightly more numerous. Cypsela 1.6 × 1 mm, initially pale, chartaceous maturing brown and smooth, slightly compressed, unwrinkled.