Androsace mucronifolia

Description

Androsace mucronifolia Watt is a cushion-forming alpine of the western and central Himalaya, distributed across Pakistan, India, China, Afghanistan and Nepal (gbif_countries: PK, IN, CN, AF, NP) with 153 occurrences in GBIF. It is a plant of dry, open, stony alpine slopes, rock crevices, gravelly ridges and exposed turf, generally in the drier inner ranges, occurring up to around 4500 m. The image data from Paga La Phidi in Nepal at 3400 m, flowering in July (noted alongside Rhodiola upleuroides), place it in the high-summer alpine zone where compact perennials exploit brief favourable conditions.

It is a low, mat- or cushion-forming perennial composed of dense leaf rosettes. The leaves are small, imbricate and characteristically mucronate, the firm cuspidate tips giving rise to the epithet mucronifolia, with margins often ciliate. From the rosettes arise short scapes bearing solitary flowers or small few-flowered umbels subtended by an involucre of bracts. The flowers have a campanulate five-lobed calyx and a salverform corolla with a short tube and five spreading lobes, white to pale pink with a contrasting yellow to reddish throat (the annulus). The fruit is a small globose capsule dehiscing by valves to release few seeds.

Androsace (Primulaceae, closely allied to Primula) comprises many high-altitude cushion species whose tight growth form is an adaptation to cold, wind and desiccation, trapping warmth and moisture at the rosette surface. The species belongs to the perennial cushion group centred on the western Himalaya and Central Asian mountains. Widespread across several countries and tolerant of harsh exposed sites, it is not considered threatened.

Author: Watt · Sources: POWO (Kew), GBIF, Flora of Pakistan (Primulaceae), Annotated checklist of the flowering plants of Nepal, Smith & Lowe monograph The Genus Androsace