Botanical Name / Eriocaulon brownianum Mart.

Large herb, forming large tussocks, scapes 30-80 (-100) cm long, with a hairy sheath at their base. Flowers small, packed together in a hemispherical, later globose head, 0.9-1.7 cm across. Anthers black. The dark grey or yellowish bracts at the base of the flower head have rounded, dark grey tips (picture below left). Leaves 13-40 (-60) cm long, 0.6-1.0 cm wide, hairy. Marshy grassland at high elevations. Rather common. Indigenous. Also in India and Bangladesh. (J de Vlas) Robust perennial with tufts of leaves at the tips of elongate rhizomes; rhizomes stout, hard, up to 30 cm long, densely clothed in roots and old leaf- bases. Leaves very broad, thick, opaque, 14—25 cm long, 1 .5—4 cm wide, tapering upwards. Scapes single in each leaf-axil, 30—35 cm high, 0.6—0.7 mm in diameter, strongly 6-ribbed; sheaths fairly tight, the tip acuminate, much extended beyond the scape emergence. Capitulum hemispherical, 7—9 mm wide, white, the peripheral flowers slightly larger and forming an undulate margin; involucral bracts ± equalling the capitulum width, coriaceous with thinner margins, straw-coloured, the outermost narrowly oblong, obtuse, the inner progressively wider, becoming oblong-cuneate and greyish-tinged; floral bracts loosely imbricate with the tips of the petals exposed among them, oblong-cuneate, scarious, blackish, acute, densely white-papillose upwards: receptacle villous. Flowers 3-merous, c.3.5 mm long. subsessile. Male flowers: calyx spathate, the broadly triangular lobes spongy upwards and densely white-papillose, two laterals lightly keeled, the median flat; petals equal. 1 .5 mm long, ligular, the tips protruding from the calyx, white-papillose with a prominent elongate apical gland; anthers black. Female flowers: sepals dark grey, deeply navicular, the keel gibbous and broadly winged, densely white papillose on the spongy portion; petals equal and equalling the sepals, narrowly oblanceolate, densely white-papillose above the middle, densely pilose below with similar but hyaline hairs. Seeds unknown. (FOC)

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