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Support the Flora of the Southeastern US

2024 has been a banner year for making the best flora we can imagine. We've created:
With financial support from people like you, we are aiming even higher in 2025. Together we can accomplish all this: Vote on our 2025 priorities
  • Add Global Conservation Ranks (GRanks) vote
  • Professional graphic keys (polyclaves) to individual families/genera vote
  • 2 new FloraQuest apps: Florida & Mid-South vote
  • Image overlays highlighting diagnostic characters with arrows vote
  • iNaturalist integration in FloraQuest vote
Write-in vote: vote
We've set a goal of recruiting 200 ongoing supporters to donate $15 or more each month in 2025. Please help us reach this goal and make next year's flora even better:

Click the number at the start of a key lead to highlight both that lead and its corresponding lead. Click again to show only the two highlighted leads. Click a third time to return to the full key with the selected leads still highlighted.

Key to Asteraceae

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image of plant
Show caption*© Alan Cressler: Ampelaster carolinianus, Juniper Creek, Juniper Prairie Wilderness, Ocala National Forest, Marion County, Florida 4 by Alan Cressler
1 Plant a shrub or liana (woody vine), definitely with woody growth well above ground level
image of plant
Show caption*© Scott Ward
1 Plant an annual, biennial, or perennial, lacking woody growth above ground level (or suffrutescent at the base).
image of plant
Show caption*© Keith Bradley
  2 Leaves opposite or whorled, at least on the lower stem nodes (the leaves higher on the stem sometimes alternate).
image of plant
Show caption*© Jay Horn
  2 Leaves either alternate (not opposite even at lower nodes of the stem) or basal only (the heads on scapiform stems).
image of plant
Show caption*© Keith Bradley
      4 Heads borne on stems with leaves, the leaves alternate, opposite, or whorled on the stem, and sometimes also well developed basal leaves or rosettes.
        5 Heads discoid, disciform, radiant, or radiate (not only composed of ligulate florets); sap usually clear.
          6 Heads discoid or disciform (composed primarily of disc florets and peripheral filiform florets), OR heads radiant, essentially composed of ordinary disc florets and dilated periphereal florets (these peripheral florets dilated, perfect, pistllate, or netural, but lacking broadly expanded laminae of ordinary ray florets).
             7 Leaves not spiny-margined; phyllaries spine-tipped or not; disk flowers variously colored (including pink)
               8 Pappus well-developed, of bristles, awns, scales, or a combination of these.
          6 Heads radiate, with both central disc and peripheral ray florets, the ray florets with prominent laminae.
                   10 Rays yellow, cream, orange, or rarely red-tinged.
                     11 Receptacles naked (epaleate), rarely with imbedded bristles (or Gaillardia sometimes with short setae 1-6 mm long but these much shorter than the pappus scales of the cypselae)
                   10 Rays white, pink, purple, or bluish.
                       12 Pappus well-developed, of bristles, awns, scales, or a combination of these.