Leptinella serrulata

Detailed description

Dioecious, creeping, perennial herb forming small tufted patches within open grassland. Rhizomes buried, pale, wiry and glabrous; branches infrequent, usually single at flowering nodes; basally clad in scales grading up to leaves spirally-arranged and set 5–15 mm apart. Short shoots growing up from buried rhizomes, bearing 3–6 tufted leaves near apices. Roots slender, easily broken, 0.4 mm diameter. Leaves 1-pinnatifid, 7–20 × 2–6 mm; blade 6–20 mm, green, glaucous or purple-black, elliptic or obovate, submembranous, older leaves usually diffusely brown-pigmented, hairy to densely silvery-hairy, midrib raised along most of ventral surface though sometimes obscured by hairs; pinnae 8–20 pairs, close-set, overlapping, cut to rhachis, broadly obovate; teeth on all or the majority of pinnae, up to 6 per pinna, on distal margins, cut c. ½ across pinna, close-set, more or less oblong, obtuse, sometimes obscured by hairs. Peduncles villous hairy, on short shoots, about equal in length to leaves, 10–30 mm, ebracteate or bearing 1 simple bract. Pistillate capitula 2–4 mm (up to 8 mm diameter in fruit); surface convex; involucre urceolate; involucral bracts 20–40, unequally 3- or more seriate, broadly elliptic, green, villous, elongated after anthesis to enclose subglobose frutiing head; florets 30–95, 2 mm long, curved, yellow-green, corolla marginally longer than wide, dentition unequal. Staminate capitula 3–5 mm diameter; involucre hemispherical; involucral bracts 8–15, unequally uni-, or biseriate, not elongated after anthesis; florets slightly more numerous. Cypsela 1.4 × 0.8 mm, initially chartaceous and pale maturing brown and smooth, slightly compressed, unwrinkled.