Clintonia udensis


Clintonia udensis is a species of flowering plant in the lily family Liliaceae. It is the only species of Clintonia native to Asia. It prefers sparsely forested habitat including the alpine forests of the Himalayas.

Description

Clintonia udensis is a perennial herbaceous plant that spreads by means of underground rhizomes, forming colonies on the floors of temperate forests. It has 3--5 egg-shaped to elliptical leaves, each leaf long and wide. The leaf margins are pubescent when young. The pubescent stem is long. While fruiting, the stem elongates up to long. The inflorescence is 3--12-flowered, in short terminal racemes with densely pubescent pedicels. The tepals are white, sometimes bluish, each tepal long. The berries are dark blue, almost black, up to across.

Taxonomy

Clintonia udensis was first described by Ernst Rudolf [von Trautvetter] and Carl [Anton von Meyer] in 1856. The specific epithet udensis, which means "from the River Uda or the Uden district of Siberia", evidently refers to a region in the Russian Far East where the plant is known to occur.
, Plants of [the World Online] accepts the following infraspecific names:
  • Clintonia udensis var. alpina H.Hara
  • Clintonia udensis var. udensis
The word alpina means "of upland or mountainous regions". Indeed, members of C. u. var. alpina are exclusively found above in the Himalayas.
Some authorities do not accept the above infraspecific names. The claim is that there are no morphological characters that consistently separate the two varieties.

Distribution

Clintonia udensis is wide-ranging, from the Russian Far East to southeast Asia, extending east-west from the Kuril Islands in the Pacific Ocean to the Western Himalaya region.
C. u. var. alpina is found in the Himalayas, Assam, northern Myanmar, and western China.