Erect perennial herb 20–50 cm tall with a branched crown at the base; stems several, usually branched, with a dense felty vestiture of woolly hairs; leaves oblanceolate, usually narrowly so, or sometimes narrowly elliptic, flat, acute to acuminate with a soft dark mucro, with a cuneate sessile base, mostly 2–4 cm long, 5–8 mm wide, thick and felty with a dense woolly vestiture on both sides.
Capitula 6–12 in rather dense terminal leafy corymbs, these sometimes grouped into panicle-like aggregations, broadly campanulate (the laminae of the involucral bracts oblique to patent at flowering), 1.3-1.7 cm long when pressed (including the laminae) eventually 2-2.5 cm diam.; involucral bracts 6-8-seriate, the intermediate ones longest; outermost bracts enveloped in and largely obscured by long woolly-cobwebby hairs; intermediate bracts with scarious white or sometimes pinkish opaque narrowly elliptic blunt laminae and short firm subherbaceous linear cobwebby-hairy claws about a fifth of their length, 11–13 mm long in total length and exceeding the florets by 9–10 mm; florets numerous, all bisexual; style branches unevenly capitate (longer abaxially), shortly papillose.
Achenes oblong, subterete but slightly 4-angled in cross-section, not compressed, antrorsely scabrous with coarse papillae, a pale grey-brown; pappus bristles 15–20, free, barbellate from the base, slightly more coarsely so towards the apex, dull-white.[2]
