(C.B.Clarke) Hand.-Mazz.
Description
Ligularia hookeri is a robust perennial herb of the eastern Himalaya and adjacent China, recorded from China, Nepal, India, Bhutan and Myanmar, with around 574 georeferenced records spanning the subalpine and alpine zones. It inhabits alpine meadows, open grassy slopes, forest margins and damp, rocky ground, often in seepage areas and along streams. The plant photographed at Dzongri in Sikkim at 4100 m, flowering in August, is characteristic of its high-elevation summer habitat, where it flowers at the height of the monsoon among other tall meadow herbs.
It arises from a stout rootstock and produces a cluster of large basal leaves on long, sometimes purplish petioles; the blades are broadly reniform to orbicular-cordate, palmately veined and toothed at the margin. The flowering stem is erect and stout, bearing few to several large capitula in a lax raceme or corymb. Each head has an involucre of broad bracts and is radiate, with conspicuous yellow to orange-yellow ligulate ray florets surrounding numerous tubular yellow disc florets. The fruit is a glabrous cylindrical cypsela crowned by a pappus of fine bristles.
Ligularia, of tribe Senecioneae, is distinguished from related Senecio and Cremanthodium by its radiate, erect, large-headed inflorescences and broad cordate leaves; C. B. Clarke first described this taxon, later combined in Ligularia by Handel-Mazzetti. The showy heads are pollinated by bumblebees, butterflies and flies of the high meadows, and the pappose cypselae are wind-dispersed. The species is widespread across the eastern Himalaya and of no current conservation concern, though it forms a conspicuous and ecologically important element of alpine pastures.
Author: (C.B.Clarke) Hand.-Mazz. · Sources: POWO (Kew), GBIF, Flora of China, Flora of Bhutan, Annotated Checklist of the Flowering Plants of Nepal, Liu monograph of Ligularia