Mairia petiolata is a tufted, variably hairy, perennial plant of up to assigned to the family Asteraceae. Its leaves are in a ground rosette, and have a stalk of mostly long and an inverted egg-shaped to elliptic, 6–9 cm (2.6–4.6 in) long and wide leaf blade, with a toothed margin. It mostly has two flower heads at the tip of the branches of each erect, dark reddish brown scape. The flower heads have a bell- to cup-shaped involucre that consists of 20–24, purplish, overlapping bracts in 3–4 whorls. These protect 12–16 pink, ray florets, surrounding many yellow disc florets. This species was only seen flowering once, in December. It is known from one location in the Langeberg, Western Cape province of South Africa.
Taxonomy
This species of fire daisy was first recognised by Ulrike Zinnecker-Wiegand in 2011. She named it Mairia petiolata, based on a specimen collected by South African botanist Elsie Elizabeth Esterhuysen at Misty Point on Goedgeloof Peak, in the Swellendam District, Western Cape province of South Africa in 1979.
Description
Mairia petiolata is a perennial herbaceous plant of up to high. It has dark brown to black, thick and succulent roots of up to long and about 2 mm (0.08 in) thick. The approximately six to ten leaves are in a ground rosette, and have a stalk of mostly long (full range 1–9 cm). They are slender, often washed dark purple-red, always densely set with white woolly hairs on the inner axils, and the remainder of the surface white woolly, eventually or even very young hairless. The leaf blade is inverted egg-shaped to elliptic, 6–9 cm (2.6–4.6 in) long and wide. The tip is mostly sharply, rarely bluntly pointy, the base tapering gradually to a point (or attenuate), the margin with coarse and irregular teeth, perhaps somewhat lobed, seldom almost entire, rolled down. On the underside a netted structure of veins is visible but on the upper surface, only a single main vein can be distinguished. The leaves are often coloured dark red, both surfaces may be hairless or set with few or many short woolly hairs, but the leaf surfaces are always visible through the indumentum.
From each rosette, usually one to three rigid, erect, dark reddish brown, ribbed, occasionally loosely woolly, sparsely glandular and slightly broadened flower stalks of long emerge, with one to three bracts that are increasingly smaller further up, which branch about halfway, are white woolly just below the mostly two, rarely one or three flower heads. The bracts that jointly surround the florets in the same head form a broadly bell-shaped to cup-shaped involucre of about high and 1–1 cm in diameter. There are between twenty and twenty four overlapping bracts arranged in three to four whorls, occasionally with white woolly hairs and some glands on the surface, each of which is tinged dark red-violet or purplish but green in the middle, narrowly oval to narrowly inverted egg-shaped, with papery margins set with a dense, regular row of equally long hairs. The bracts in the outermost whorl are 5–7 mm (0.22–0.28 in) long and wide. The bracts in the inner whorl are long and wide, eventually hairless.