(Rupr.) Bocquet
Description
Silene gonosperma is a high-mountain perennial campion with a wide Central Asian, Himalayan and boreal distribution, recorded from Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, the Himalaya (India, Nepal, Bhutan), Mongolia, Russia, China and even reaching Sweden in the broad sense. GBIF aggregates around 657 occurrences spanning this trans-Asiatic range. It is a plant of the alpine zone, growing in stony and grassy meadows, screes, moraines and exposed slopes, commonly above 3500 m and reaching well over 4000 m. The West-Nepal population photographed at Kalmura (4200 m, June) typifies its occurrence in cold, open high-alpine turf near the upper limit of flowering plants.
The species forms small tufts or cushions from a branched woody caudex, producing short, ascending, often glandular-hairy flowering stems. The leaves are opposite, linear to narrowly oblanceolate, the basal ones crowded and the cauline pairs few and reduced. The flowers are usually solitary or few, often nodding, with a tubular to inflated, many-nerved calyx frequently flushed dark purple, and five clawed petals, pink-purple to dull violet or greenish, with shallowly emarginate to bifid laminae. Ten stamens and three styles are present. The fruit is an ovoid capsule opening by six teeth and bearing the distinctive angular, often winged seeds that give the epithet.
Silene gonosperma, transferred by Bocquet from earlier placements in Melandrium and Wahlbergella, exemplifies the taxonomic flux around the boreal-alpine campions, and several subspecies and varieties have been described across its enormous range. Its cushion habit, dark calyx and angular seeds aid identification among co-occurring high-alpine Silene. As a widespread, locally frequent species of remote high-mountain habitats it faces no significant threats, though its uppermost populations may be sensitive to warming.
Author: (Rupr.) Bocquet · Sources: POWO (Kew), GBIF, Flora of China, Flora of Pakistan, Flora of USSR, Annotated Checklist of the Flowering Plants of Nepal, Caryophyllaceae monograph of Silene (Bocquet)