An everlasting timepiece

I like a flower you can tell the time by, although I don't think a true floral clock (horologium florae) is more than a whimsy.   

I photographed these flowerheads twice on the morning of 27 October last year: 7.30 am when the flowerheads were closed or partly open, and then 10 am when fully open. It was a sunny day, which also effects the timekeeping.

Golden Everlasting is the common name for what we now called Xerochrysum bracteatum. The variant featured here is a big flowering one called 'Dargon Hill Monarch'. This showy cultivar was discovered by botanists in 1961, near Cunningham's Gap, in the McPherson Ranges of south-eastern Queensland.

Compared to the more typical forms of this species, Dargon Hill Monarch has grey (and woolly) rather than green foliage, and larger flowers (up to 9 centimetres across). 

There are the two colour variants growing together here: one with white 'ray florets' (the papery outer layer of the daisy flowerheads), the other with yellow. There are many other similar cultivars grown today, and the white form illustrated here may well be one of those.

Within that papery outer layer are a hundred or so flowers, the orange mass in these photographs. That's what interests pollinators, such as this honey bee.

Xerochrysum is a genus of eight species, which was originally named in error as Bracteantha, and before that part of a larger Helichrysum (a name many of us grew up with for the everlasting daisies).

Xerochrysum bracteatum grows naturally throughout Australia, an may well include a number of separate species (perhaps some of the forms selected as cultivars).

Golden Everlastings are easy to grow from seed or cuttings, and can look for for a few years with a bit of light trimming to encourage flowering and stop them becoming too 'leggy'.

Postscript: Thanks to Mike Fay for providing a link to the recent article confirming that the paper daisy loved and grown by Napoléon Bonaparte and Empress Joséphine, and probably introduced onto the island of St Helena while Naapoleon was exiled there, was indeed Xerochrysum bracteatum.