Hook.f.
Description
Cathcartia villosa is an eastern Himalayan poppywort distributed through India, Nepal, Bhutan and southern Tibet (China), the GBIF dataset holding about 110 records (codes for Canada and Great Britain reflect cultivated and herbarium material). It grows in cool, humid montane and subalpine settings: shaded forest margins, mossy rocks, ravine sides and damp banks, broadly between about 2400 and 4000 m. The collections illustrated span this gradient, from Tongsa in Bhutan at around 2400 m and Luksor at 3000 m to Dzongri in Sikkim near 4000 m, recorded between June and August.
It is a softly villous perennial herb clothed throughout in long, spreading yellowish-brown hairs. The leaves are mostly basal, long-petiolate, the blade rounded and palmately lobed to crenate, the whole densely hairy and yielding a coloured latex when broken, as is typical of the poppy family. One or a few nodding, golden-yellow flowers are borne on slender hairy scapes; each has two caducous sepals, four broad spreading petals, numerous stamens and a superior ovary. The fruit is an elongate, hairy capsule dehiscing by valves to shed many small seeds.
Long treated within Meconopsis, this plant is now widely referred to the segregate genus Cathcartia, a Sino-Himalayan group of yellow-flowered, villous poppyworts distinguished from true Meconopsis by molecular and morphological evidence; older sources and the source URL still use the name Meconopsis villosa. It is valued in temperate gardens as an elegant woodland perennial. The species is locally frequent across its range and is not formally assessed as threatened, but it depends on cool, moist forest-edge habitats susceptible to deforestation and to climatic warming.
Author: Hook.f. · Sources: POWO (Kew), GBIF, Flora of Bhutan, Flora of China, Annotated Checklist of the Flowering Plants of Nepal, Grey-Wilson The Genus Meconopsis