(D.Don) Holub
Description
Anemonastrum polyanthes (formerly Anemone polyanthes) is a robust alpine herb distributed across the Himalaya and into western China, with GBIF holding around 362 occurrences from India, China, Nepal, Pakistan, Bhutan, Afghanistan and Myanmar. It grows in subalpine and alpine meadows, open slopes, forest clearings and grazed pastures, typically between 3000 and 4300 m, flowering with the onset of the summer monsoon. The cited collections from above Paro in Bhutan at 3200 m and from Khiar Kutti in Garhwal, India, at 3900 m, both in June, capture its broad altitudinal spread across damp, herb-rich high-meadow turf.
It is a perennial arising from a stout rootstock, with all principal leaves basal, long-petiolate and palmately three- to five-partite, the segments deeply cut and toothed, hairy on both surfaces. The flowering stem bears a whorl of leaf-like, sessile involucral bracts subtending an umbel-like cyme of several flowers, as the epithet polyanthes implies. Each flower lacks petals; the five to eight petaloid sepals are white, sometimes flushed pinkish or bluish outside, surrounding numerous yellow stamens and a domed cluster of carpels. The fruits are flattened, glabrous, ovate achenes with a short hooked beak, aggregated into a rounded head.
The segregate genus Anemonastrum, raised from Anemone on molecular and morphological grounds, accommodates this group of umbellate-flowered, multi-flowered montane species. Like other Ranunculaceae it contains acrid protoanemonin, deterring grazing livestock so that it often persists conspicuously in over-grazed alpine pasture. Widespread and frequently common throughout the Himalayan arc, it is of Least Concern and serves as a prominent component of summer-flowering high-altitude meadow communities.
Author: (D.Don) Holub · Sources: POWO (Kew), GBIF, Flora of Bhutan, Flora of Pakistan, Annotated Checklist of the Flowering Plants of Nepal, Hand-Mazzetti and Tamura treatments of Anemone