© The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew 2007. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA 251 603. HELICHRYSUM ORIENTALE Compositae Nicholas Hind, Kit Strange and Jeremy Broome Summary . The taxonomy, conservation status and cultivation requirements of Helichrysum orientale (L.) Gaertn., are discussed. A description, colour plate and black and white line drawings of the dissections of this species are given. The problems with accepting so-called ‘Vaillant’ combinations and generic names are discussed. It seems fitting that, having dealt with the attractive dwarf shrubby species Helichrysum arwae J.R.I. Wood in an earlier Bot. Mag. article (Hind et al., 2007), when plants of the type of Helichrysum Mill., H. orientale (L.) Gaertn., flowered again at Kew it would also be featured in the Magazine. Clapham (1976) placed H. orientale in Sect. Helichrysum, the H. stoechas group and it is one of around 25 EVER- LASTINGS native to the Mediterranean Basin, out of a genus of some 600 or so species (cf. Anderberg, 1991). The Mediterranean H. stoechas group consists of a few subshrubby species with a more or less dense tomentose indumentum, erect or ascending flowering stems, near cylindrical capitula (at least before anthesis), and usually with shiny yellow, or yellowish, phyllaries. Both H. italicum (Roth) G. Don, CURRY PLANT and H. saxatile Moris possess a characteristic smell of curry, something also found in H. arwae from the Yemen Arab Republic. Sutton (2001), in his chapter on Everlasting Flowers (Rock Garden Plants), likened Helichrysum orientale to H. sibthorpii Rouy, an endemic of Athos in north-east Greece, when in flower. Unfortunately, such a similarity is far from true, especially since H. sibthorpii (of sect. Virginea (DC.) Fiori) has few (1–3) capitula with white phyllaries on much shorter inflorescences. Both, however, are obligate chasmo- phytes and are only found on cliffs, albeit with H. orientale found more widely around the Aegean islands, Crete and the west and southwest Turkish coast. Galbany-Casals et al. (2004), working on the phylogeny of a num- ber of species of Helichrysum, using nuclear rDNA ITS sequence data, showed that several regional groups of species could be rec- ognized. The results showed very good support for a monophyletic Mediterranean Basin complex that included H. orientale. Interestingly