Chicory tribe - part 2

There are few distinctive features that help to identify this group. Lets take a typical common sunflower and look at the center portion: it is composed of tiny florets, their structure is: 5 little petal-like appendages; to avoid confusion they are referred to as corolla lobes since they are not independent from each other and form a tube - those are known as disk flowers. The rays are produced by corolla tube splitting on the top surface, and as they advance outward in development they are tongue-like and referred to as ray flowers. At the very base where they join the top of the forming seed they are still tubular (see the illustration at http://montana.plant-life.org/families/Asteraceae.htm).
Unlike common sunflower the chicory has every floret formed as if it were a ray flower, all the way to the center and often becoming smaller toward the center. The other characteristic feature of the tribe is the presence of latex - milky juice. Because of the latex uninformed people will often refer to them as milkweeds, knowing that milkweeds are poisonous. The third distinctive feature is little less conspicuous: when chicory flowers bloom the phyllaries (the flower heads also known as capitulum, and phyllaries are little leaf-like bracts at the base and often surrounding the capiulum) usually fold downward and wrinkle unlike most of the other sunflowers.

Chicory tribe

It has been shuffled back and forth between tribal position and a subfamily position. Most currently the APG III (Angiosperm Phylogeny Group) has covered every categorical position as being a subfamily, and the tribal designations are not used by them. On Wikipedia within this tribe they are showing 100 genera worldwide, out of this 100 I am familiar with 23. The reason I am familiar with them is that they are all found in the Interior and Coastal Southern California. About half of those would be considered as aggressive weeds. As food plants they are very important, starting with lettuce and endive, and oyster plant (Tragopogon - goatsbeard). I have no knowledge of any toxicity within this group. They all contain latex mostly bitter, but herbivores of all types seem not to be deterred by it. There are about 3 plants that are generally obnoxious to gardeners, because their seeds blow everywhere and they come up continuously, these are: Sonchus oleraceus (derived its name from its value as a food source in early history of human food in the Mediterranean, the world "oleraceus" means vegetable), Lactuca serriola - prickly lettuce and Taraxacum officinale - dandelion. For human's usage the dandelion is well spoken of as a healthful green and a flavoring for wine. The young plants of prickly lettuce in late winter that have not bolted yet are a very nice salad vegetable. Older plants become bitter.
To be continued...