Felicia aethiopica is a low shrublet of up to about 50 cm (1+2⁄3 ft) high that is assigned to the family Asteraceae.

The plant is called wild aster or dwarf Felicia in English, and wilde-aster or bloublombossie in Afrikaans.

[2] The flower heads sit individually on the clearly distinguished inflorescence stalks that are mostly richly glandular near the top.

The bracts surrounding the head that jointly form the involucre of up to 8 mm (1⁄3 in) in diameter, are arranged in two whorls.

In the center of each corolla are five free filaments and five anthers merged into a tube, through which the style grows when the floret opens, hoovering up the pollen on its shaft.

F. aethiopica is a woody shrublet with mostly only the lowest pair of leaves opposite and the remainder alternate, twelve to fourteen ray florets and also can be distinguished by the three resin ducts in the involucral bracts, that lack in both other species.

F. amoena is a biennial or perennial plant with at least the lowest four to six leaves in pairs as well as those at each branching, and the remainder alternate and may have up to twenty five ray florets.

[2] The wild aster was first described in 1768 by Nicolaas Laurens Burman, based on a specimen in the herbarium collection of his father, the Dutch botanist and physician Johannes Burman, that had been collected at Caput Bonae Spei, a term used for the southwest of the Cape Province.

Cassini's taxon was reassigned to the genus Cineraria by Jens Vahl, who created the combination C. microphylla in 1836.

It is restricted to the Cape Peninsula, the Kogelberg area, the neighborhood of Hermanus and Gansbaai, the Potberg and near Swellendam.