(DC.) Benth.
Description
Cremanthodium reniforme is a high-alpine herb of the central and eastern Himalaya, distributed through Nepal, India (Sikkim), Bhutan and adjacent China; the 294 occurrences map a continuous Himalayan arc, with outlying records in New Zealand reflecting cultivated material. It grows on moist alpine meadows, rocky slopes, screes and streambanks, characteristically between about 3500 and 4800 m. The collated localities, from Bhutan's Jule-Tso at 4100 m and Sikkim's Dzongri at 3900 m to the Rupien La and the Kagmara-La in west Nepal at 3900–4300 m, span June to October, illustrating its strictly high-elevation distribution and protracted summer flowering in the snow-melt zone.
The species is a perennial herb with a short rhizome bearing fleshy roots and erect, often purplish, arachnoid scapose stems. The basal leaves are conspicuous, long-petiolate and reniform to cordate-orbicular, with a palmately veined, dentate blade; the cauline leaves are few and reduced. The capitula are large, solitary and nodding, radiate, with an involucre of blackish-hairy phyllaries. The ray florets are female and golden-yellow, the disc florets tubular and yellow. The cypselae are oblong and glabrous, bearing a pappus of soft, brownish or whitish barbellate bristles roughly equalling the corolla.
Cremanthodium is a Sino-Himalayan genus of about seventy species centred on the Hengduan Shan and Himalaya, segregated from Ligularia chiefly by its solitary nodding capitula, an adaptation that shields pollen and developing achenes from rain and intense alpine radiation. The reniform basal leaves make C. reniforme distinctive among its congeners. Restricted to high alpine habitats yet wide-ranging, it is not currently regarded as threatened, though such species are sensitive to climatic warming and upslope habitat compression.
Author: (DC.) Benth. · Sources: POWO (Kew), GBIF, Flora of China Vol. 20-21, Flora of Bhutan, Flora of Nepal, Good Revision of Cremanthodium