(Decne.) Sch.Bip.
Description
Saussurea fastuosa is a Sino-Himalayan species distributed across the high mountain ranges of China, India, Nepal and Bhutan, with around 94 georeferenced occurrences documenting a coherent eastern Himalayan to southwest Chinese range. It is a plant of temperate and subalpine zones, favouring forest margins, moist grassy slopes, scrub and stream banks, typically between roughly 2500 and 3800 m. The photographed material from Simka in Indian Garhwal at 2800 m, flowering in October, is representative of its autumn-flowering behaviour in the western part of its range, where it occupies cool, humid clearings within mixed conifer and broad-leaved forest.
It is a robust perennial herb with an erect, leafy, often glandular-pubescent stem arising from a stout rootstock. The leaves are alternate, the lower ones petiolate and lyrate-pinnatifid to broadly ovate, the upper progressively smaller, sessile and somewhat amplexicaul, with dentate margins and a thinly arachnoid-hairy lamina beneath. The capitula are medium-sized and aggregated in a corymbose synflorescence, each surrounded by an ovoid to campanulate involucre of imbricate, often purple-tinged, frequently squarrose phyllaries. The florets are all tubular and purple; the achenes are glabrous and crowned by a double pappus, the outer row scabrid and caducous, the inner of plumose, basally connate bristles.
Within the very large and taxonomically complex genus Saussurea, this species belongs to the broad-leaved, lowland-to-subalpine assemblage rather than the cushion-forming snow lotuses of the highest alpine zone. The name S. fastuosa (Decne.) Sch.Bip. is the accepted name. As an entomophilous late-season nectar source it is visited by bumblebees and other long-tongued insects, and like its congeners it disperses by anemochory via the plumose pappus. It is locally frequent and not regarded as threatened.
Author: (Decne.) Sch.Bip. · Sources: POWO (Kew), GBIF, Flora of China Vol. 20-21, Flora of Bhutan Vol. 2, Flora of Nepal, Lipschitz Genus Saussurea (monograph)