Trautv. & C.A.Mey.
Description
Clintonia udensis is a woodland perennial with a remarkably wide East Asian to Himalayan distribution, recorded from China, Japan, Russia (Far East), Korea, Nepal, India, Bhutan, Myanmar and Pakistan, with over 3800 GBIF occurrences across this temperate arc. It is a shade-loving plant of moist, humus-rich coniferous and mixed forests, fir and rhododendron understorey, bamboo thickets and damp shaded gullies, typically between about 2500 and 4000 m in the Himalaya. The plant photographed south of Rara Lake in West Nepal at 3500 m in June, flowering as the high forests emerge from winter, exemplifies its preference for cool, sheltered subalpine forest floors where deep leaf litter retains moisture.
The species arises from a short, creeping rhizome and produces a basal rosette of two to five broadly elliptic to oblong-obovate leaves that are conspicuously parallel-veined, entire and ciliate at the margin, sheathing at the base. A leafless scape rises above the foliage bearing a terminal raceme of a few nodding, campanulate flowers. The six white tepals are oblong and free, subtending six stamens with linear anthers, and the superior ovary matures into a fleshy, ellipsoid to ovoid berry that ripens from green to a deep blue-black, containing several seeds and crowned by the persistent style base.
Clintonia is a small Holarctic genus of about five species traditionally placed in the Liliaceae and treated by some authors within an expanded Convallariaceae or Uvulariaceae. C. udensis is the sole Asian representative and the only one with white flowers and a black berry, the remaining species being North American. Its disjunct amphi-Pacific generic distribution is a classic example of the East Asian–North American floristic link. The berries are dispersed by birds, and the species is widespread and common; it is of no particular conservation concern.
Author: Trautv. & C.A.Mey. · Sources: POWO (Kew), GBIF, Flora of China Vol. 24, Flora of Bhutan Vol. 3, Flora of Nepal, A Monograph of the Genus Clintonia (Liliaceae)