Klatt
Description
Lysimachia prolifera is a Sino-Himalayan species distributed across the central and eastern Himalaya and southwestern China, with verified occurrences in Nepal, India, Bhutan, China, Myanmar and Pakistan; outlying records from Japan and the United States among the roughly 194 collections almost certainly reflect cultivated or misdetermined material. It is a plant of moist temperate to subalpine habitats, favouring shaded forest margins, streamsides, mossy banks and damp grassy clearings. The photographed population at Niuli Kharka in Gorkha, Nepal, at about 2700 m and flowering in May, is typical of its mid-montane band where snowmelt and monsoon moisture keep the substrate reliably humid.
The species is a perennial herb with slender, often decumbent to ascending stems arising from a creeping rhizomatous base. The leaves are simple, opposite or sometimes whorled, ovate to lanceolate, entire-margined and frequently gland-dotted, narrowing to a short petiole or sessile base. The flowers are borne singly in the leaf axils or in lax leafy racemes; the corolla is rotate and five-lobed, typically yellow, the lobes spreading and often marked with darker glands. Stamens are five, opposite the corolla lobes and shortly connate at the base, the ovary superior with a single style. The fruit is a small, globose, dehiscent capsule containing numerous minute angular seeds.
Within Primulaceae, Lysimachia is a large, taxonomically intricate genus now circumscribed broadly, and species such as L. prolifera are distinguished by subtle differences in leaf arrangement, gland distribution and inflorescence form that have historically caused confusion. Ecologically it contributes to the herbaceous understorey of Himalayan forests and is visited by generalist pollinating insects. No specific conservation concern is recorded for this widespread montane species, though, like many Himalayan herbs, it is locally sensitive to forest clearance, trampling and grazing along trekking corridors.
Author: Klatt · Sources: POWO (Kew), GBIF, Flora of Nepal, Flora of China, Flora of Bhutan, Hu's monograph of Lysimachia (Primulaceae)