A lesser plant

Bertie Wooster, Wodehouse’s famous Drone, sometimes muses about the best way to start a story. Like him, I will start mine by setting out a time and place. In the middle of August, during a monsoon rain, I was picking my way through a wild open patch in Khandala. I noticed two bunches of bushes of Asystasia dalzelliana (neelkanth in literary Marathi, santapau in Konkani and Marathi) in the open, away from any trees. They were in bloom, quite unaware of the fact that botanists have determined that they flower between September and January. Could this change be due to global warming, or local microclimate? I may have seen this waist high plant earlier, but I don’t remember identifying it before. So, without doing some archaeology in my hard disk, I cannot tell you whether it continues to flower into winter.

I read that it is endemic in the western and eastern ghats, and that it has been over-exploited because of its known folk-medicinal properties. So much so, that there is even a paper on its in-vitro propagation. I suspect that between this over-exploitation and habitat loss it must be endangered. Unfortunately the IUCN list does not contain any information on this species.

This lack of information on the species propagates into the wider scientific literature. There is a lot of material on its invasive cousin, A. gangetica, but next to nothing on A. dalzelliana. I’ve linked to two sources of independent information in the previous paragraph. The third piece of information I picked up is that it the larval host for one species of a rather drab butterfly. That’s the sum total of a morning’s search!