Gazania – wildflower

Family: Asteraceae
Form: Herb
Origin: Native to South Africa.
Weed Type(s): Weed, Naturalised, Garden Escape, Environmental Weed
also: Treasure Flower

Gazania is a tough, low-growing perennial herb with lance-shaped leaves and brightly coloured daisy-like flowers in bronze, yellow and orange tones. It produces abundant wind-blown seeds and spreads rapidly. It withstands salt-laden winds and grows well in sandy soils. It is often spread in garden waste.

Gazania is widespread and common in Victoria and naturalised in South Australia and Western Australia.

The related Coastal gazania, Gazania rigens, has become naturalised on coastal dunes and along roadsides from southern Sydney to the central coast, on the Eyre Peninsula and southern Mt Lofty region of South Australia and in the Moreton region of South-east Queensland.

They need the sun, and soil has to be very well drained and watered daily It faired through the winter here in British Columbia in a balcony planter and continues to bloom rofusely. I bought the plants last year.

Hieracium

- Orange Hawkweed
- Devil’s Paintbrush
(H. aurantiacum)
Family: Asteraceae

Although considered a pernicious weed, the bright orange blooms along paths and roadways are breathtaking. I’ve personally transplanted a few to planters on my balcony. They thrive, blooming more than once, if given good fertilizer, right after a blooming is done.

Blackish hairs on the bracts around flower heads and elsewhere were so reminiscent of coal in their blackishness, that herbalists in the sixteenth century called it Grim the Collier.