()DC.) Choisy
Description
Schima wallichii is a large evergreen tree distributed across the eastern Himalaya and Southeast Asia, with GBIF records from China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, India, Nepal, Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos, Bhutan, the Philippines, Cambodia and Bangladesh among others, totalling around 3706 occurrences. It is a dominant or co-dominant canopy element of subtropical and lower montane broadleaved forest, frequently a pioneer that colonises forest gaps, secondary woodland and abandoned cultivation on humid hill slopes. The trees photographed at Wangdi-Punakha in Bhutan at about 1400 m and at Chainpur in eastern Nepal at about 1300 m, both in May, illustrate its prevalence in the warm subtropical mid-hill forests of the southern Himalayan front, where it often forms extensive stands with oaks and laurels.
It is an evergreen tree with grey, longitudinally fissured bark and reddish young shoots. The leaves are alternate, coriaceous, elliptic to oblong-lanceolate, entire or obscurely serrate, glabrous and glossy above and somewhat paler beneath. The flowers are solitary or few in the upper leaf axils, large and showy, with five white petals surrounding a dense central mass of numerous yellow stamens, the whole subtended by silky sepals and bracteoles and emitting a sweet fragrance. The fruit is a woody, globose, loculicidal capsule that splits into valves to release flattened, broadly winged seeds adapted to wind dispersal.
A member of the tea family (Theaceae), Schima wallichii is an ecologically important successional and timber species, its hard wood widely used in construction, while the bark and other tissues contain irritant saponins. Its winged seeds and gap-colonising habit make it an effective coloniser of disturbed montane forest, contributing to forest regeneration and watershed protection. Broadly distributed and often abundant, the species is not of conservation concern; rather it is silviculturally valued and frequently retained or planted in mixed broadleaved forestry across its range.
Author: ()DC.) Choisy · Sources: POWO (Kew), GBIF, Flora of China Vol. 12, Flora of Bhutan Vol. 1, Flora of Nepal, Bloembergen A Critical Study in the Complex-Polymorphous Genus Schima (Theaceae)