C.B.Clarke
Description
Cyananthus pedunculatus C.B.Clarke is an eastern Himalayan alpine herb confined to the high mountains of Nepal, India (Sikkim, Darjeeling), Bhutan and adjacent southern China, the GBIF record of about 60 occurrences underscoring its restricted distribution. It is a plant of moist alpine turf, rock ledges, scrub margins and grassy slopes in the subalpine to alpine zone, typically between 3500 and 4500 m. The photographed plant below Dzongri in Sikkim at around 4000 m, flowering in August, exemplifies its monsoon-season anthesis in cool, humid, well-drained high-altitude meadows beneath the snow peaks of the eastern ranges.
The species is a low, tufted or shortly ascending perennial arising from a slender woody rootstock, the stems several, prostrate to decumbent and clothed with small, alternate, entire to crenate leaves that are often revolute-margined and sparsely hairy. The flowers are solitary and terminal, borne on conspicuously elongate peduncles that distinguish the species. The corolla is broadly campanulate to funnel-shaped, blue to violet-blue, with five spreading lobes and a dense ring of white hairs in the throat; the calyx is tubular and hairy. Five stamens and a half-inferior ovary are present, the fruit a many-seeded capsule dehiscing apically.
Cyananthus is a genus of around twenty species centred on the Sino-Himalaya and characterised by its throat-bearded, campanulate corollas, sometimes treated near the Lobelioideae but retained within Campanulaceae. C. pedunculatus is recognised by its long flower-stalks, separating it from cushion-forming congeners such as C. lobatus and C. microphyllus. As a localised high-elevation endemic it is potentially sensitive to climate-driven upslope shifts and disturbance, though not formally assessed; it is occasionally grown by alpine-plant specialists.
Author: C.B.Clarke · Sources: POWO (Kew), GBIF, Flora of China, Flora of Bhutan, Annotated Checklist of the Flowering Plants of Nepal, T. T. Yü — Monograph of the genus Cyananthus