Royle
Description
Corydalis cashmeriana is a celebrated blue-flowered alpine herb of the western and central Himalaya. GBIF records place it in Nepal, India, Bhutan and China, with around 130 occurrences reflecting its distribution through the high mountains from Kashmir eastward. It grows on moist alpine meadows, turfy slopes, the margins of melting snowbeds and damp rocky ground, generally between roughly 3000 and 4500 m, where cool, well-watered summer conditions prevail. The photographed plants from south of Rara Lake in West Nepal at 3800 m and from Meggu Kichatti in Garhwal, India, at 3400 m, both flowering in June, illustrate its early-summer blooming in the subalpine to alpine belt as the snow retreats.
It is a low, tufted perennial herb arising from small, clustered tubers, producing a few erect, leafy stems. The leaves are mostly basal and long-petiolate, the blades much-divided and glaucous, the ultimate segments small and obovate. The inflorescence is a short terminal raceme of few flowers; each flower is strongly zygomorphic, with four petals of which the outer upper one is prolonged backwards into a slender, gently curved spur, the whole of an intense sky-blue to deep azure. The fruit is a narrow, elongate capsule dehiscing to release shining black seeds bearing an elaiosome.
Corydalis is a very large genus of the Fumarioideae, here treated within the Papaveraceae, with its greatest diversity in the Sino-Himalayan region. The intensely blue-flowered alpine species, of which C. cashmeriana is the type of much horticultural interest, are notoriously challenging in cultivation. The seed elaiosome promotes dispersal by ants, while the spurred flowers are pollinated by long-tongued bumblebees probing for nectar held in the spur.
Author: Royle · Sources: POWO (Kew), GBIF, Flora of Nepal, Flora of China (Papaveraceae, Fumarioideae), The Genus Corydalis (Lidén & Zetterlund)