O.E.Schulz
Description
Cardamine loxostemonoides is a Himalayan and Sino-Himalayan bittercress recorded from Nepal, Pakistan, China, India and Bhutan, the South African and other anomalous entries among its roughly 156 occurrences best treated as database noise rather than native range. It is an alpine to subalpine herb of cool, moist habitats, growing along snowmelt rills, in damp meadows, beside streams and on seepage slopes where the soil stays saturated. The photographed plant from the Churta-Khola in West Nepal, at about 4000 m and flowering in June, is typical of its high-montane preference and its early-summer flowering coinciding with the surge of meltwater following snow retreat.
It is a perennial herb arising from a slender rhizome, with erect to ascending, often few-branched stems. The leaves are pinnately compound or pinnatisect with several pairs of lateral leaflets or segments, the terminal one frequently larger, the texture thin and the margins entire to lobed. The flowers are arranged in terminal racemes and show the regular four-petalled cruciform corolla of the family, white to pale pink or lilac, with six tetradynamous stamens. The fruit is a slender, linear, laterally compressed silique that dehisces elastically by two valves coiling from the base to fling the seeds, the style persisting as a short beak; the epithet alludes to a resemblance in stamen form to Loxostemon.
Cardamine is a large, cosmopolitan genus within Brassicaceae notable for frequent polyploidy and hybridisation, traits that complicate species delimitation in the Himalayan alpine flora. Like many relatives it favours moist, disturbed microsites and disperses by explosive silique dehiscence, allowing rapid colonisation of freshly exposed ground. The species is widespread across the high Himalaya and faces no specific conservation threat, although its dependence on reliable snowmelt moisture makes such hygrophilous alpine herbs potentially responsive to changes in precipitation and glacial regime.
Author: O.E.Schulz · Sources: POWO (Kew), GBIF, Flora of China, Flora of Pakistan, Flora of Bhutan, Al-Shehbaz revisionary studies of Cardamine (Brassicaceae)