Olearia tomentosa

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Olearia tomentosa, photographed by Max Campbell — fig. e Max Campbell, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 152373358

Olearia tomentosa, photographed by Tricia Kaye — fig. f Tricia Kaye, CC0 1.0 / obs. 169909522

Olearia tomentosa, photographed by libby hepburn — fig. g libby hepburn, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 150816254

Olearia tomentosa, photographed by Tim — fig. h Tim, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 101872332

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection

Herbarium: Smithsonian, US National Herbarium
Accession: US 3055193
Filed as: Olearia tomentosa (J.C.Wendl.) DC.
Det. by: not recorded on this sheet
Collected: R. M. King 1989-12-07
Origin: AU
The sheet: View the digitised specimen (CC0 1.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 2 botanical countries

Native distribution of Olearia tomentosa, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
New South Wales	NSW	AUSTRALASIA
Victoria	VIC

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 147 in flower of 165 examined

100%

80%

57%

50%

88%

98%

96%

91%

Proportion of examined Olearia tomentosa in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	8	8	100%	68% to 100%
Feb	1	2	too few examined
Mar	3	3	too few examined
Apr	4	5	80%	38% to 96%
May	0	0	too few examined
Jun	1	3	too few examined
Jul	4	7	57%	25% to 84%
Aug	3	6	50%	19% to 81%
Sep	35	40	88%	74% to 95%
Oct	52	53	98%	90% to 100%
Nov	26	27	96%	82% to 99%
Dec	10	11	91%	62% to 98%

Peak flowering in Jan. Each bar is the share of Olearia tomentosa observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 147 of 165 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 4 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Where it actually grows measured, from 443 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	4.1 °C	8.9 °C	11.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	22.1 °C	23.6 °C	26.4 °C
Annual rainfall	768 mm	1,108 mm	1,327 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	144 mm	186 mm	245 mm

It is barely found anywhere that freezes. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 443 research-grade observations of Olearia tomentosa that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 7 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

Aster dentatus Andrews
Aster otagoensis Kuntze
Aster tomentosus Schrad. ex J.C.Wendl.
Diplopappus rotundifolius Less.
Eurybia dentata var. dentata
Olearia dentata Moench
Orestion dentata (Andrews) Raf.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.