Perennial herb up to c. 60 cm tall, stock stout, woody, crowned with old fibrous leaf bases, roots producing small fusiform tubers, flowering stem solitary, simple below the inflorescence, glabrous, leafy. Radical leaves sometimes wanting at flowering, up to c. 12 x 4 cm, roughly half the length petiolar, elliptic or lanceolate, apex subacute, more or less abruptly contracted to the petiole-like base, expanded below, half-clasping, margins callose-crenulate or serrulate, both surfaces thinly hairy, more particularly on the midvein below; cauline leaves similar but sessile, elliptic to linear-lanceolate passing upwards into lanceolate-acuminate bracts, base sometimes panduriform or eared, half-clasping and decurrent on the stem in broad to narrow wings, wings mostly deeply toothed or lobed, undulate. Heads discoid, up to c. 20 on long bracteate peduncles corymbose-paniculately arranged. Involucre campanulate, bracts c. 14-20, 9-11 mm long, about equalling the disc, glabrous, calyculus bracts few, short. Flowers whitish. Achenes 6 mm long, fusiform, ribbed, hairy between the ribs.
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