Balf.f. & W.W.Sm.
Description
Primula glandulifera is a high-alpine primrose of the western Himalaya, known from Nepal and India, with GBIF recording 31 occurrences. It inhabits damp alpine turf, moist gravelly slopes, streamsides and the margins of late snowbeds well above the treeline. The photographed plant grows on the Kagmara La in West Nepal at about 4900 m, flowering in July, an exacting high-elevation setting where short summers, intense radiation and cold, wet substrates govern plant life.
The species is a small perennial herb forming a basal rosette of leaves, often glandular as the epithet glandulifera indicates, the lamina oblong to spathulate and frequently bearing farina or glandular hairs. The flowering scape is slender, bearing one to several flowers in a terminal umbel above a whorl of bracts. Each flower has a tubular calyx and a salverform corolla, typically violet to purple with a contrasting eye, the limb of five notched lobes; the species is heterostylous, and the fruit is a small capsule.
The taxon is accepted and was described by Balfour and W.W. Smith, prolific authors on Asiatic Primula. It belongs to one of the genus's many Himalayan sections, a group whose species boundaries rest on farina, indumentum and floral detail. As a narrow-range, very high-altitude orophyte it is biogeographically significant and potentially sensitive to climate-driven upward shifts of the alpine zone, meriting monitoring of its restricted populations.
Author: Balf.f. & W.W.Sm. · Sources: POWO (Kew), GBIF, Flora of Nepal, Richards' monograph Primula, Smith & Fletcher's studies of Asiatic Primula