Two-tone everlasting is a sweetly-scented, densely gray-white-tomentose biennial or perennial with stout branched leafy stems growing some 1-1/2' to 3-1/2' tall.  The alternate leaves are green and glandular above and white-woolly beneath, sessile and widely clasping the stem at the base with ear-shaped appendages, lanceolate-oblong to about 3" long, and sometimes crisped along the margins.  The disciform flower heads are in rather open corymbs on terminal branchlets with 25-50 flowers per head, each about 1/4" in diameter.  The involucres are ovoid to ± bell-shaped with shiny white or pale yellow phyllaries.  The disciform heads are typically composed of a few disk flowers with several series of marginal pistillate flowers each of which has very slender, cream-colored corollas. The disk flowers have a pappus of many fine bristles. Two-tone everlasting, also called Bioletti's cudweed because it was named by the Italian-Welsh-English Professor of Viticulture at the University of California Frederick Bioletti, is a common species in dry open places to 2500' in coastal sage scrub and chaparral plant communities in most of cismontane Southern California and the Channel Islands, blooming from January to May.

Click here for Latin name derivations: 1) Gnaphalium 2) bicolor.
Pronunciation: na-FAY-lee-um BI-kol-or.
Click here for Botanical Term Meanings.