Strawflower
Xerochrysum bracteatum · Garden flowers
Strawflower
Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 14 August 2025
What look like petals are papery bracts, stiff enough to keep their shape and colour long after the flower is cut and dried - the reason strawflowers have been grown for dried arrangements for generations.
Native to Australia, where it grows as a scrubland wildflower far scrappier-looking than the tidy garden forms. The bracts open and close with the humidity, even after the flower is dead, which is how it became a cottage barometer.
Strawflower
Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 26 July 2025
What look like petals are stiff, papery bracts rather than true petals, which is why strawflowers dry so well for arrangements.
The actual flowers are the small tufted florets packed into the orange centre, where a hoverfly is doing the real work. An Australian, from country where a flower that never wilts is a sensible thing to be.
Strawflower, pink
Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 22 September 2024
A strawflower, not the China aster it was first written up as. The "petals" are the tell: stiff, papery bracts with pointed tips, layered in rows and white at the base, around a disc of small yellow florets. They rustle rather than bend, and hold their colour dried, which is the whole reason the plant is grown. A China aster's rays are soft and strap-like and wilt like any daisy's.
An Australian native in the same family as the daisies and sunflowers, and a fixture of cutting gardens; this one is in the Botanic Garden's annual border.
Birds, insects, plants and other wildlife, mostly from Brooklyn, with some from further afield.
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