Roxb. ex DC.
Description
Clematis gouriana is a vigorous climbing vine with a broad tropical-Asian and Himalayan distribution, recorded from China, India, Taiwan, the Philippines, Japan, Indonesia, Nepal, Myanmar, Thailand and many other countries, with a large dataset of around 2207 occurrences. It scrambles over shrubs, hedgerows, forest margins, thickets and roadside vegetation, predominantly in subtropical to warm-temperate hill country. The photographed plant from Gom Kora in eastern Bhutan at 1850 m, flowering in October, exemplifies its autumn blooming in low to mid-elevation forest borders.
It is a woody to semi-woody liana climbing by means of twining, clasping petioles. The leaves are opposite and pinnately compound, usually with three to five ovate, acuminate, entire or toothed leaflets borne on slender stalks. The inflorescences are large, much-branched axillary and terminal panicles of numerous small, fragrant flowers; lacking petals, each flower has four spreading, creamy-white, narrowly oblong sepals and a central tuft of many stamens and carpels. The fruit is an aggregate of compressed, pubescent achenes, each bearing a long, persistent, plumose feathery style that forms silvery seed-heads dispersed by wind.
Clematis gouriana, described by Roxburgh and DC., belongs to a complex of white-flowered, panicle-bearing climbers in section Clematis and is morphologically close to species such as C. grata. Its massed autumn flowering provides abundant late-season nectar for bees and other insects. Widespread, fast-growing and tolerant of disturbance, it can behave almost weedily along forest edges and is of no conservation concern.
Author: Roxb. ex DC. · Sources: POWO (Kew), GBIF, Flora of China (Ranunculaceae), Annotated Checklist of the Flowering Plants of Nepal, Grierson & Long Flora of Bhutan, Johnson's monograph Clematis: The Genus