Franch.
Description
Aster vestitus is a Sino-Himalayan composite distributed through China, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Myanmar and Thailand, with cultivated material accounting for the British GBIF records; some 247 occurrences are aggregated overall. It is a plant of open subalpine and alpine slopes, forest margins, scrub and grassy banks, generally in the upper montane to alpine zone. The specimen figured was recorded at Shele-La in Bhutan at about 3,600 m in September, when the species comes into flower toward the end of the growing season, its asters providing late-season colour on the high meadows.
It is an erect perennial herb with stems and foliage more or less clothed in a soft, woolly or villous indumentum, as the epithet vestitus (clothed) implies. The leaves are alternate, lanceolate to oblong, sessile or shortly petiolate, the margins entire to obscurely toothed and the surfaces pubescent. The capitula are radiate and borne in a loose corymbose arrangement; the involucral bracts are imbricate in several series. Each head bears an outer ring of pistillate ray florets with violet to pale purple ligules surrounding numerous yellow, tubular, bisexual disc florets. The fruit is a flattened, hairy achene (cypsela) crowned by a pappus of barbellate bristles that aids wind dispersal.
Aster in the broad sense is a large genus undergoing taxonomic recircumscription, with many Asiatic species now distributed among segregate genera; A. vestitus belongs to the predominantly Sino-Himalayan assemblage of woolly-stemmed alpine asters. The radiate capitula are insect-pollinated, while the pappus-bearing cypselas are dispersed anemochorously. Widespread and locally frequent across its montane range, the species is of no particular conservation concern.
Author: Franch. · Sources: POWO (Kew), GBIF, Flora of China, Flora of Bhutan, Annotated Checklist of the Flowering Plants of Nepal, Grierson's revisionary studies of Himalayan Aster (Compositae)