Hook.f. & Thomson
Description
Codonopsis subsimplex is an alpine herb of the eastern Himalaya, distributed across Nepal, India (Sikkim), Bhutan and adjacent China, with about 101 georeferenced records in GBIF. It grows in high-elevation meadows, scrub margins, rock crevices and stony alpine slopes, typically within the belt between about 3500 and 4500 m. The plants illustrated were photographed in Sikkim's Chopta Valley at 4000 and 4250 m in August, at the height of the monsoon flowering season, where it occurs among dwarf shrubs and damp turf in the upper alpine zone.
The species is a slender perennial herb arising from a thickened, fleshy rootstock, with stems that are erect to weakly ascending and, as the epithet suggests, little branched. The leaves are small, alternate or scattered, ovate to lanceolate, and shortly petiolate to nearly sessile. The flowers are solitary and terminal, nodding on slender pedicels, with a broadly campanulate corolla typically pale bluish, greenish or purple-tinged and often marked internally with darker veining or coloured spots. The five corolla lobes are shallow; the fruit is a capsule crowned by the persistent calyx, dehiscing to release numerous small seeds.
Codonopsis (Campanulaceae) is a genus of the temperate and alpine Asian flora well represented in the Himalaya, several members of which are characterised by a distinctive foetid odour when bruised. Pollination is largely by bumblebees attracted to the pendent bell-shaped flowers. The fleshy roots of various Codonopsis species are valued in regional herbal medicine. C. subsimplex is restricted to high alpine habitats and, while not formally assessed as threatened, depends on intact alpine pasture and is sensitive to overgrazing and climatic warming.
Author: Hook.f. & Thomson · Sources: POWO (Kew), GBIF, Flora of China, Flora of Bhutan, Annotated Checklist of the Flowering Plants of Nepal, Hong Monograph of the Genus Codonopsis