About Arctotis venusta Norl.
Arctotis venusta Norl. is a species of plant in the Asteraceae family, native to southern Africa. Its native range includes South Africa's Cape Provinces, Free State, and Northern Provinces, as well as Lesotho, Botswana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe. Its common names are silver arctotis, kusgousblom, and blue-eyed African daisy. This species is a perennial with stout, woolly stems, aromatic, heavily lobed violin-shaped leaves. Its showy flower heads hold many ray florets that range from creamy-white to pink or bronze, with lavender to reddish undersides; the centers of the flower heads are filled with purple disc florets. Its fruit is a hard achene, with a tuft of plumelike hairs on one end and an array of pappus scales on the other. Arctotis venusta is widely cultivated as an ornamental plant. It is grown as a ground cover for its silvery foliage and showy flower heads, it adapts to many growing conditions, and it is sometimes used for erosion control. It has escaped from cultivation and become naturalized in parts of the United States (California, Arizona, South Carolina), Australia, and Central and South America, where it is considered a noxious weed. Some sources treat Arctotis venusta as the same species as the rare Arctotis stoechadifolia, but most authors recognize the two as separate distinct species.
