An annual, branching herb with nearly smooth, or sometimes puberu-lent, and somewhat grooved, stout stems, 2 to 3 feet high. Leaves alternate, ovate, serrate or denticulate, 3 to 8 inches long, 1 to 3 inches wide, short petioled, the upper leaves almost or quite sessile. Heads of flowers about one-fourth of an inch high, composed entirely of tubular flowers, purplish or pinkish in color, the heads arranged in terminal corymbose cymes, usually several or many on a plant. Involucres bell-shaped, composed of several series of appressed, ovate-lanceolate pubescent bracts, somewhat purplish in color. Outer flowers of each head with threadlike corollas, three-cleft or toothed at the apex and pistillate; center flowers with five-cleft corollas.

In salt marshes along the coast from Massachusetts to Florida, Texas and Mexico. Flowering from August to October. Flowers with a faint odor of camphor.

Memoir 15 N. Y. State Museum

Plate 249

B. Spicy Or Salt-Marsh Fleabane - Pluchea camphoruta