Benth.
Description
Elsholtzia flava is a Sino-Himalayan element distributed across the temperate to subtropical mountains of southern and eastern Asia, with verified records from China, Nepal, India, Bhutan and Japan; GBIF aggregates some 558 occurrences, several of them at the eastern margin of the genus's range. In the western Himalaya it ascends to around 2700 m, as documented by the photographed material from Simkarok in Indian Garhwal collected in September, the late-monsoon flowering season. It is a plant of open slopes, forest margins, clearings and disturbed ground on moist, humus-rich soils, behaving as a robust ruderal sub-shrub that exploits gaps in the upper temperate broadleaf belt.
The species is a coarse, aromatic perennial or shrubby herb reaching 1-2 m, with erect, branched, quadrangular and finely pubescent stems woody at the base. The leaves are opposite, petiolate, broadly ovate to ovate-lanceolate, acuminate at the apex and crenate-serrate along the margins, glandular-punctate beneath and exuding the characteristic mint scent of the genus. Small flowers are crowded into dense, secund, cylindrical spike-like verticillasters; the campanulate calyx is five-toothed and the corolla pale yellow ("flava"), two-lipped, with four didynamous exserted stamens. The fruit comprises four smooth, ovoid-oblong nutlets enclosed in the persistent calyx.
Elsholtzia (Lamiaceae, tribe Elsholtzieae) is centred on eastern Asia and includes many late-flowering, nectar-rich, bee-pollinated species important to autumn foragers. E. flava is locally common and not regarded as threatened, its tolerance of disturbance favouring persistence; its terpenoid-rich essential oils link it to congeners long used in folk medicine and as aromatic herbs across the Himalayan and Chinese highlands.
Author: Benth. · Sources: POWO (Kew), GBIF, Flora of China, Flora of Bhutan, Flora of Pakistan, Press et al. Annotated Checklist of the Flowering Plants of Nepal, Harley et al. Labiatae (Kubitzki, The Families and Genera of Vascular Plants)