Weekend in the mountains, and botany picture #224: Podolepis robusta

We spent the weekend in the mountains, to make use of the weather as long as it is still warm and dry.

View of the ranges of Namadgi National Park from Hospital Hill Lookout.

Above a part of the lake of Three Mile Dam. We stayed the night on the local camp site.

Podolepis robusta (Asteraceae) on grassland along The Link Road. Podolepis is part of a lineage of daisies that has ancestrally lost the zygomorphic ray florets of most of the family... and is now in the process of re-inventing them. It hasn't quite settled on a fixed number of teeth yet, but what it has achieved so far was apparently enough to confuse at least some botanists of a few decades ago. Looking into the older floras, one sometimes sees the genus treated next to Astereae like Olearia and Brachyscome, in other words among generic daisies with ray florets, instead of near its actual relatives, the everlasting paper daisies.