Dittrichia viscosa
species of plant
Dittrichia viscosa, also known as false yellowhead, woody fleabane, sticky fleabane and yellow fleabane, is a flowering plant in the daisy family.
Dittrichia viscosa is a highly branching perennial common throughout the Mediterranean Basin. It has long, narrow leaves that are pointed at both ends and have teeth along the edges and glandular hairs on the surfaces. One plant can produce many yellow flower heads each with as many as 16 ray florets and 44 disc florets.
Originally, the species was found mainly in dry riverbeds and abandoned fields up to a 1500 m (5000 feet) elevation. Nowadays it is quite common in roadsides and ruderal habitats, even in urban areas. It is considered an invasive species in Australia. The false yellowhead is a tough plant, very resistant to adverse conditions and degraded environments. It is important as food for the caterpillars of certain butterflies and moths, like Iolana iolas. The galls of the plants also are habitat for Myopites stylatus and Myopites inulaedyssentericae, whose larvae are hosts to parasitic hymenoptera such as Eupelmus urozonus who are also major parasites of the olive fly, helping control its population.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Dittrichia viscosa” is species of plant. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Dittrichia, viscosa and species, not as a finished interpretation.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q311844. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1500.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dittrichia viscosa” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.