Wall.
Description
Campanula sylvatica Wall. is a Himalayan bellflower distributed along the temperate ranges from Pakistan and India through Nepal to Bhutan; the GBIF record of about 78 occurrences indicates a moderately frequent but regionally restricted endemic. As its epithet implies, it is a woodland and forest-margin herb of moist, shaded banks, clearings and grassy slopes in broad-leaved and mixed forest, broadly between 1500 and 3000 m. The photographed plant at Chongsakha in western Bhutan at about 1800 m, flowering in May, exemplifies its pre- to early-monsoon anthesis in the cool, humid mid-montane forest of the eastern Himalaya.
The species is an erect to ascending perennial or biennial herb with simple or sparingly branched, slender stems that are usually hispid or scabrid with stiff hairs. The leaves are alternate, ovate to lanceolate, toothed or crenate-serrate and shortly petiolate below, becoming sessile upward. The flowers are borne in a lax, leafy raceme or panicle, each nodding on a slender pedicel; the corolla is broadly campanulate, blue to violet-blue, divided to about a third into five spreading lobes, with a five-lobed calyx whose sinuses often bear reflexed appendages. The five stamens have dilated filament bases, and the inferior ovary ripens into a nodding capsule dehiscing by basal or lateral pores.
Campanula is a large, predominantly Holarctic genus, the Himalayan species forming a distinctive subtropical-to-temperate Asian element; C. sylvatica is recognised by its hispid stems and lax woodland inflorescence. It is taxonomically close to other Himalayan campanulas and has at times been confused in herbaria with allied forest taxa. As a fairly widespread endemic of relatively undisturbed forest, it is not formally assessed but may be locally affected by forest clearance; it has occasional value in rock and woodland gardens.
Author: Wall. · Sources: POWO (Kew), GBIF, Flora of Pakistan, Flora of Bhutan, Annotated Checklist of the Flowering Plants of Nepal, Lammers — World checklist and bibliography of Campanulaceae