(Wall.) Nees
Description
Aechmanthera gossypina is a robust Himalayan acanth distributed from south-western China through northern India, Nepal and Bhutan. GBIF records some 34 occurrences across China, India, Nepal and Bhutan. Under current taxonomy the name is treated as a synonym, with Aechmanthera gossypina regarded as the accepted name for the taxon; many authors further place Aechmanthera within an expanded Strobilanthes. The plant occupies warm-temperate to subtropical hill slopes, forest margins, shrubberies and open rocky banks of the mid-Himalaya, typically between about 1000 and 2500 m, flowering in the cooler months on disturbed and grassy ground.
The plant is a coarse, woolly perennial herb or soft shrub with erect, much-branched stems densely clothed, like the foliage, in a cottony grey tomentum—the indumentum that gives the epithet gossypina, meaning cotton-like. The leaves are opposite, ovate to elliptic, acuminate, with crenate to serrate margins and a softly hairy surface. The flowers are borne in elongate terminal and axillary spike-like thyrses subtended by leafy bracts; the corolla is funnel-shaped, pale violet to bluish, with a slightly oblique five-lobed limb. The fruit is a club-shaped, explosively dehiscent capsule, the seeds borne on hooked retinacula characteristic of the family.
Aechmanthera is a small Sino-Himalayan genus historically segregated from Strobilanthes on details of the inflorescence and seed, but molecular and morphological studies increasingly subsume it within that large, taxonomically intricate genus noted for mass-flowering (plietesial) cycles. Whether A. gossypina shares the gregarious, semelparous flowering of many Strobilanthes remains imperfectly documented. The species is reasonably widespread across the central Himalaya and is not regarded as of conservation concern.
Author: (Wall.) Nees · Sources: POWO (Kew), GBIF, Flora of China, Flora of Bhutan, An Annotated Checklist of the Flowering Plants of Nepal, A Revision of the Genus Strobilanthes (Acanthaceae)