page_title: Felicia (genus)
section_title: Flowerhead
hierarchical_section_title: Felicia (genus) / Description / Flowerhead
caption_attribution_description: English: Felicia amoena subsp. latifolia dark disc form, photographed near De Hoop NP, SA
context_page_description: Felicia is a genus of small shrubs, perennial or annual herbaceous plants, with 85 known species, that is assigned to the daisy family. Like in almost all Asteraceae, the individual flowers are 5-merous, small and clustered in typical heads, and which are surrounded by an involucre of, in this case between two and four whorls of, bracts. In Felicia, the centre of the head is taken by yellow, seldomly whitish or blackish blue disc florets, and is almost always surrounded by one single whorl of mostly purple, sometimes blue, pink, white or yellow ligulate florets and rarely ligulate florets are absent. These florets sit on a common base and are not individually subtended by a bract. Most species occur in the Cape Floristic Region, which is most probably the area where the genus originates and had most of its development. Some species can be found in the eastern half of Africa up to Sudan and the south-western Arabian peninsula, while on the west coast species can be found from the Cape to Angola and one species having outposts on the Cameroon-Nigeria border and central Nigeria.
context_section_description: The flowerheads have two rows of involucral bracts in almost all species of the section Neodetris (the exceptions being F. cymbalariae, F. denticulata, F. dubia and F. tenera), while the rest of the species have three or four rows of bracts. The communal base (or receptacle) on which the individual florets are implanted is lightly convex and lacks a receptacular bract (or palea) at the foot of each floret. Almost always, one row of female ligulate florets surrounds a centre of several rows of bisexual disc florets. Ligulate florets are sometimes absent in several taxa belonging to the section Lignofelicia (F. filifolia subsp. bodkinii, F. whitehillensis), and in F. macrorrhiza ligulate florets are never present. This is also true for F. ferulacea of the section Felicia. Ligulate florets are mostly bluish purple, particularly in the sections Lignofelicia, Anhebecarpaea and Felicia.  In the section Dracontium, the color of the ligulate florets ranges from pale to middle blue, while in the section Neodetris the range of bluish colors is even larger. In these two sections the color is never purplish. Yellowish ligulate florets are restricted to F. mossamedensis and some species in the section Longistylis. In herbarium specimens, colors may change even when dried professionally, such as from bright yellow to green in the aptly named F. smaragdina, from yolk yellow to bright yellow in F. bohmii, and from white to pink in F. welwitschii. Some species across the sections have white ligulate florets, and specimens with white florets occur in many species that usually have bluish ligulate florets. The tube of the florets is often densely set with glandular hairs. Disc florets are yellow when young, and may become reddish later. Few annual species have whitish to dark blue discs such as F. heterophylla, F. josephinae, and a form of F. amoena subsp. latifolia.
caption: F. amoena subsp. latifolia, is a taxon which sometimes has a blue disc, but yellow discs are more common
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