Fleabanes are annual, biennial, or perennial herbs with alternate (or sometimes all basal) leaves, and solitary to numerous, hemispheric to top-shaped flowerheads. The flowerheads usually have rays, with the few to usually more or less numerous female flowers usually bearing evident and often narrow rays, these mainly having varying shades of pink, blue, or purple, to white, or in a few species yellow. In a few species the female flowers are rayless, and in a few others the female flowers are lacking. The involucral bracts are narrow, varying from herb-like and equal in length to papery and evidently partly overlapping. The receptacle is flat or a little convex, and naked. The disk flowers are more or less numerous, yellow in color. Some species have rayless female flowers between the disk flowers and the ray flowers. The anthers are entire or nearly so at the base. The style branches are flattened, with inward-facing marginal stigma-bearing lines and mostly with short (up to 0.5 mm), lanceolate and pointed to more often broadly triangular and round-tipped appendages. The achenes are 2- to many-nerved. The pappus consists of hair-like and often fragile bristles, with or without a short outer series of very small bristles or scales. The genus consists of nearly 200 species worldwide, of N. and S. America, Europe, and Asia, nearly all of temperate or boreal regions, or mountainous areas in tropical America. The name comes from the Greek eri, early, and geron, old man, probably referring to the early flowering and fruiting of most species.
Guide to Identify Presented Species of Genus Erigeron
FLOWERHEADS AT LEAST 2. STEM LEAVES WELL DEVELOPED
E. speciosus – Showy Fleabane Stems often clustered, leafy, 15-80 cm tall. Open woods, foothills to montane.
Flowerheads blue, purple or pink, with 65-150 slender ray florets 9-18 mm long.
Leaves alternate, lance-shaped, hairless, entire, slightly clasping the stem.
