(Decne.) Pennell
Description
Pedicularis rhinanthoides subsp. labellata is a high-alpine lousewort of the Himalaya and the Tibetan plateau, the GBIF records (treated here as a synonym of the accepted Pedicularis rhinanthoides labellata) falling within China and India, with the species at large extending through Nepal and adjacent ranges; the small number of georeferenced occurrences reflects its restriction to remote high elevations. It grows in wet alpine meadows, marshy turf, seepage slopes and streamside flushes, characteristically between about 4000 and 5000 m. The photographed plant from Baga-La-Phedi in West Nepal at 4500 m in July is typical of its mid-summer flowering in damp, high-alpine pasture near the snowline.
It is a low, hemiparasitic perennial herb rooting into the roots of neighbouring grasses and sedges, with one to several ascending stems from a short rootstock. The leaves are mostly basal and pinnatisect, the segments narrow, toothed and crisped. The flowers are borne in a short terminal raceme; the rose-pink to purplish corolla is strongly two-lipped, with a long-tubed galea drawn out into a slender, often beaked upper lip and a broad, conspicuous lower lip, the well-developed lip being the basis of the epithet labellata. The fruit is a flattened, obliquely ovoid capsule containing several seeds.
The vast genus Pedicularis reaches its greatest diversity in the Sino-Himalayan alpine zone, where galea form is closely tied to specialised bumblebee pollination. This taxon, a regional subspecies of the widespread P. rhinanthoides, exemplifies the fine-scale infraspecific variation pervading the genus. As a habitat-restricted hemiparasite of high wet meadows it is potentially sensitive to grazing change and warming, though it has not been formally assessed.
Author: (Decne.) Pennell · Sources: POWO (Kew), GBIF, Flora of China, Annotated Checklist of the Flowering Plants of Nepal, Flora of British India, Pedicularis of the Sino-Himalaya (Tsoong/Yang revision)