H.Hara
Description
Saxifraga neopropagulifera is a high-alpine cushion- or mat-forming perennial of the central Himalaya, known from Nepal and Bhutan, with GBIF recording 9 occurrences. It grows on damp rock ledges, moss-cushions, gravelly slopes and the margins of late-melting snow patches in the upper alpine zone. The illustrated plant was gathered in the Churta Khola of West Nepal at about 4200 m, flowering in June, where cold, well-drained substrates and a brief growing season prevail.
The species is a low, tufted herb forming compact rosettes of small, often spathulate to oblong leaves. As its epithet implies, it characteristically produces vegetative propagules (bulbils or gemmae) in the leaf axils or at the rosette base, a mode of clonal reproduction well suited to environments where seed set is unreliable. The flowering stems are short and few-flowered, bearing small white to pale flowers with five free petals, ten stamens, and a superior to half-inferior ovary maturing into a two-beaked capsule.
The taxon is accepted in current treatments. It belongs to a group of bulbil-bearing Himalayan saxifrages allied to Saxifraga propagulifera, whose names have been repeatedly revised; H. Hara erected the present species to accommodate Himalayan material. The reliance on asexual propagules is a recurrent adaptive theme among Sino-Himalayan alpine Saxifraga, underpinning persistence on unstable scree. As a narrowly distributed orophyte it is of biogeographic interest and potential conservation concern.
Author: H.Hara · Sources: POWO (Kew), GBIF, Flora of Nepal, Flora of Bhutan, Hara's Enumeration of the Flowering Plants of Nepal