(Schult.) Santapau & Merchant
Description
Wendlandia heynei is a shrub or small tree of the Indian subcontinent and its Himalayan foothills, recorded from India, Nepal, Bhutan and Pakistan. GBIF holds some 179 occurrences, the bulk across peninsular and north-eastern India and the lower Himalaya. It is a plant of warm-temperate to subtropical broad-leaved forest, forest margins, ravines and secondary scrub on hill slopes, typically from the plains up to roughly 1500 m. The populations imaged in eastern Nepal at Mewa-Khola (1050 m, April) and in the Darjeeling region of Indian West Bengal at Lingza (1300 m, May) illustrate its place in the moist hill forests of the eastern Himalayan tract, flowering as the pre-monsoon season advances.
The plant is evergreen to semi-deciduous, with terete, often puberulous young branchlets. The leaves are opposite or sometimes ternate, elliptic to oblong-lanceolate, entire and acuminate, with interpetiolar stipules typical of the Rubiaceae. The small flowers are crowded in large, much-branched terminal panicles or thyrses that give the tree a frothy, plumose appearance. Each flower has a short-lobed calyx, a white, funnel- to salver-shaped corolla with a slender tube and five spreading lobes, and five included or shortly exserted stamens; the ovary is inferior and bilocular. The fruit is a minute, globose, septicidal capsule containing numerous small angular seeds.
Wendlandia (tribe Wendlandieae) is a genus of around ninety species centred on tropical and subtropical Asia, distinguished by its dense paniculate inflorescences and small capsular fruits. The epithet honours Heyne, and the species has accumulated several synonyms reflecting its wide variability across the subcontinent. As a common, adaptable component of disturbed and secondary hill forest it is not of conservation concern; locally its wood and bark have minor uses.
Author: (Schult.) Santapau & Merchant · Sources: POWO (Kew), GBIF, Flora of British India, Flora of Bhutan, Annotated Checklist of the Flowering Plants of Nepal, revision of the genus Wendlandia (Cowan)