Sm.
Description
Hedychium thyrsiforme is a ginger lily native to the Himalayan foothills and northeastern India, ranging through Nepal, India, Bhutan and Bangladesh, with cultivated and naturalised records elsewhere (including Mauritius, Vanuatu, Brazil, the USA and Britain) reflected in its roughly 127 GBIF occurrences. It is a plant of warm, humid subtropical forest, favouring shaded banks, ravines and the margins of broadleaved woodland, and is frequently epiphytic or lithophytic on mossy trunks and rocks. The localities photographed, at Galephu in Bhutan at 850 m in September and at Gorkha in Nepal at 1200 m in October, lie within its typical low to mid-elevation belt where late-monsoon humidity sustains flowering.
It is a robust perennial herb growing from a fleshy, aromatic, creeping rhizome and producing leafy pseudostems formed by sheathing leaf bases. The leaves are distichous, oblong-lanceolate, glabrous above and shortly hairy beneath, with a conspicuous ligule. The inflorescence is a dense, cylindrical terminal thyrse from which the epithet derives, crowded with white flowers; each has a slender corolla tube, narrow reflexed segments, and the showy whitish labellum and greatly exserted long-filamented stamen that give the genus its butterfly-lily aspect. The fruit is a capsule splitting to reveal seeds with an orange-red aril.
Hedychium belongs to tribe Zingibereae of the Zingiberaceae and is centred on the Indo-Malayan region, where its long-tubed, fragrant flowers are adapted to hawkmoth pollination. Several species, this among them, are grown ornamentally and can naturalise in the tropics. The input family spelling "Zingiberacaea" is retained as given, though the accepted family is Zingiberaceae. The species is not regarded as threatened across its wide native range.
Author: Sm. · Sources: POWO (Kew), GBIF, Flora of Bhutan, Flora of British India, Hedychium revision (Wood / Sanoj & Sabu)