(Hook. f. & Thomson) Hook.f.
Description
Leycesteria glaucophylla is an eastern Himalayan shrub distributed across India, China, Bhutan and Nepal and into Myanmar; GBIF documents about 113 occurrences, including a few cultivated records in Great Britain and New Zealand. It is a plant of temperate montane forest, occurring at forest margins, in shrubberies, along stream sides and in clearings, generally between about 2000 and 3000 m. The photographed individual grows in Bhutan at Tumching La at around 2600 m in May, a setting typical of this shade-tolerant honeysuckle relative within the cool, humid forests of the eastern Himalaya during the pre-monsoon period.
The species is an erect, deciduous shrub with hollow, often glaucous young stems. The leaves are opposite, ovate to lanceolate, acuminate, entire to slightly toothed, and conspicuously glaucous, particularly beneath, a feature reflected in the epithet glaucophylla. The flowers are borne in pendulous, bracteate terminal and axillary inflorescences subtended by leafy bracts; each has a tubular, funnel-shaped, white to pinkish corolla with five short lobes. The fruit is a many-seeded berry ripening to a dark purplish colour, attractive to birds which act as the principal seed dispersers.
Leycesteria glaucophylla (Hook.f. & Thomson) Hook.f. belongs to a small genus of Himalayan and Sino-Himalayan shrubs allied to Lonicera, placed in Caprifoliaceae; its showy bracts and pendulous spikes give the genus ornamental interest, and several species are cultivated. The species is restricted to the eastern Himalaya and adjacent ranges but is locally frequent in montane forest and not currently regarded as threatened. Its bird-dispersed berries aid colonisation of forest gaps and margins.
Author: (Hook. f. & Thomson) Hook.f. · Sources: POWO (Kew), GBIF, Flora of Bhutan, Flora of China, taxonomic revisions of Leycesteria (Caprifoliaceae)