Grape-leaf anemone (Eriocapitella vitifolia) were growing at the edge of the path. We were coming down Phulchowki in the south of Kathmandu. I did a double take. It is a flower of the late summer. You expect to see it in August and, maybe, in September. How was it growing here in early November? Could it be something else? Not a chance. The form of the flower, the shape of the leaves, everything pointed to this one species of anemone. The seasons are topsy turvy of course, but this late a flowering!
This post appears as scheduled while I am travelling. I’ll be connected, but may be slow to look at your comments and posts. I hope you will bear with my delays.
Why did this flower look half familiar? I couldn’t figure out what it was, so I took photos and left the identification for later. Now when I dug it out after a whole season has passed, I realized why I had that nagging feeling. This coneflower (Strobilanthes penstemonides) is related to the Karvi and Neelakurinji which mass-flower once in many years. I’ve seen other coneflowers too, but mainly in the western ghats, but this was growing in the Himalayas.
Could the ID be wrong? I can’t rule that out without uprooting the plant. Still, everything I see fits: the shape of the flower, the anthers and stamen, the form of the leaves (highlighted in the photo above), the size of the bush and flower, and even the way it buds out. Then I remembered that a year earlier I’d seen chir pheasants eating a coneflower (Strobilanthes) at a similar height in Uttarakhand. And then there is the common name: Dalhousie blue bells. It’s a Himalayan species all right. So the ID is very likely to be correct.
This post appears as scheduled while I am travelling. I’ll be connected, but may be slow to look at your comments and posts. I hope you will bear with my delays.
A plant that I saw growing by the road down Phulchowki looked like it was about to bud. Each bud was less than half a centimeter across. “Definitely one of the Aster family,” I thought to myself as I took the macro. Not at all, as I found when I looked at the photo. The balls were made of many, really many, tiny flowers, as you can see. Each flower is less than 100 microns long. The plant is not in the family Asteraceae. The inner flowers have begun to open up, the outer buds in each ball-like inflorescence are yet to open. My camera sees things more clearly than my eye.
I had photos of the whole plant, and you can see the shape of the deeply lobed leaves here. The leaves are a couple of centimeters long, so this photo gives you a better sense of the scale of the flowers. The branching stem reminded me of knotweed. I looked through whatever flower-finders I could find. Nothing identifies these microscopic flowers. Most guides concentrate on flowers that the human eye can see. But they are insufficient today, when a pocket-sized camera can resolve what needed a low-powered microscope earlier.
I usually set the camera on focus stacking mode when I take macros of these tiny things. As a result I caught a caterpillar perched on the branch. The little crawler was about a centimeter long, so that gives you a scale of things. I have a hard time identifying moths. Identifying the caterpillar is just impossible for me.
We’d decided to spend a morning climbing Phulchowki in Kathmandu while doing some birding. That was a bit of a washout. We spotted a few birds, but just a few. But the wildflower haul was terrific. When I came across these lovely bells hanging on an otherwise dry bush I was pretty sure that I would be able to identify it later. If it had been red or orange I would have immediately put it down as a species of Aeschynanthus. The dry bush was over a meter high, with an upright central stem from which branches went out at regular intervals. I couldn’t find this in a field guide, but eventually an app pointed me in the right direction: genus Isodon. It is likely to be Isodon lophanthoides, whose Nepali name is Masino chapte.
Somehow it was not so easy to identify many of the plants I saw at an altitude of around 4000 meters in Ladakh. I’d been more successful with the plants below this height and those above. An example was the plant you see in the featured photo. I saw this about 50 meters from the shore of Pangong Tso at Spangmik. I’m pretty certain that this is a knotweed (family Polygonaceae), but I can’t drill down to the species (any help you give will be highly appreciated). It has the same growth habit, size, and flower shape as the pink knotweed (Persicaria capitata) but the flower colour is different.
After a bit of a climb from Durbuk going towards Chang La, we had to halt briefly to let a small convoy of trucks pass. As I looked out at the bushes on the slope next to me, I saw something which I didn’t even recognize as flowers. I thought it was one of the many dandelion-like plants which were seeding at this time. The bushes were only 30 to 60 cms high but grew a little above eye level on the slope next to me. I took a photo, not expecting to be able to identify it. So I’m very excited to find that this is the Himalayan Winterfat (Krascheninnikovia ceratoides) in the family Amaranthaceae (APG III). The flowers are minute and the spikes that one sees are inflorescences!
I’d seen Blue Lettuce (Lactuca tatarica) earlier at about 3500 meters, but the species has a wide vertical range in the Himalayas. I saw it again as we climbed from Durbuk towards Muglib. The previous week when I’d seen it at a lower altitude the flowers had just opened. At this higher altitude they had begun going to seed. Like many other members of the family Asteraceae at this height, the seeds are spread by the wind, borne on cottony parachutes.
I saw this plant by the side of a road above Durbuk going towards Muglib. It spread across the ground in a large clump and had many erect flower bearing stems which gave it the appearance of a dense bush. I’m not sure I’ve managed to figure out which plant it is. Could it be a peppergrass (genus Lepidium)? It is not one of the seven species listed in Flowers of India, but then there are around 200 known species in this genus. It would be great if you can help.
I saw this bush growing very close to the shore of Pangong Tso in gravelly soil. It was a spreading bush with many erect stems which 30-60 cms high. Since it did nor reach my knees, I bent to take this photo; neither the flower nor the plant has a smell. I would have called it a Nepal purslane (Koenigia nepalensis, family Polygonaceae) except that this does not have red stems like that plant.
This post is scheduled to appear while I travel. I’ll reply to your comments and look at your posts when I have network coverage.
Right on top of Wari La I saw masses of flowers blooming. It was early September, but quite warm. The flowers that you see in the featured photo belong to the Musk Larkspur (Delphinium brunonianum). Many of these 10 to 20 cm tall bushes were in full bloom. They have been recorded at least up to an altitude of 5500 meters, and perhaps they grow even higher in some patches. They typically flower from July until September. The papery flowers glowed in the sun. I didn’t feel like climbing up slope to check that they have the musky smell that gives them their name.
Nearby I saw a few stalks of these Himalayan Campion (Silene himalayensis). Their range is small, from Afghanistan in the west to western Tibet, somewhat east of here. They are said to be found up to about 5000 meters, and this was close enough to its highest elevation. Perhaps that’s why I saw few of them. The hairy stalks jutted up almost 30 cms from the spreading mass of the plant, each carrying just a couple of pairs of opposed lance-shaped leaves and one papery flower.
The most widespread of plants was this reddish clump. Before looking at it carefully I’d assumed it was a grass, but it is clearly not. Unfortunately I don’t have a good identification of it. It could be a Stonecrop (genus Sedum). If so I’m not unhappy even without a closer identification, since there are a few hundred species in this genus, and a large fraction of them lie in a belt between the Mediterranean and east Asia. I should have climbed closer to get better photos of the flowers, but the altitude made me lazy.
There weren’t many of these Ladakh Saxifrage (Saxifraga stenophylla) growing here, and the few there were hid from the wind behind small rocks. The low stem, about 10 cms tall, allows them to do that and still get the sun most of the day in summer. They are found between Tajikistan and Pakistan in the west and Sikkim in the east. We hadn’t looked for them in the lower meadows, but it is possible that we would have found them if we’d looked. Normally one would think early September is a bit late for them, but this was a warm year.
My oddest find was this plant. I was delighted to see that it was the Inverse Snow Lotus (Saussurea inversa). The snow lotuses are often hardy high altitude plants which require long winters and grow above 4000 meters. I suspect that as the planet warms and glaciers melt these will go the way of the dodo. Insufficient oxygen will arrest their movement well beyond their current limits, and the desiccation of the soil as glaciers melt will shorten their growing season. Since these plants are clearly under climate pressure, I was happy to have seen my first Snow Lotus.
I will end this post with photos of a species that I found growing about 800 meters below the pass. I don’t have a positive identification, but I suspect it is a Candytuft, from its close resemblance to the European species Iberis saxatilis. It is unlikely to be this species, because its easternmost range has been found to be Turkey. But it could be related, since there are other Candytufts in the Himalayas. The shape of the leaves is closer to I. saxatilis than to the Himalayan species I’ve been able to check.
Much of our road in Ladakh lay at altitudes of between 3200 and 3600 meters above sea level. Whenever we stopped, there were flowers by the roadside. One thinks of Ladakh as a cold desert, a rainless moonscape, but actually it is full of plants, insects, and birds. September was past the peak flowering time, but this year the weather was warmer than usual. As a result I had a lot to photograph. In this post I’ve arranged them by where I photographed them, going from west to east.
Flowers seen around Zoji La (3500 meters)
At Zoji La I spotted the usual tourist trash and took a photo very casually, thinking that the yellow flowers near it would be ragweed. But surprisingly, it is more likely to be Sacred Hawksbeard (Crepis sancta), a less common flower in the same family, Asteraceae. It is a common annual in Europe, but found eastwards up to Nepal. So I was seeing an invasive at the eastern end of its current range.
I’ve shown before a flower that was hard to miss. I took several photos of the Great Mullein (Verbascum thapsus) growing near, and above, the road on the pass. This biennial has previously been given a slightly lower range, but it is possible that the range is slowly creeping up with changes in the weather. This individual was in the second year of its growth, and one among several, so it seems to be well established around the pass.
A corydalis seen in Mulbekh (3300 meters)
When we stopped to see the giant Buddha statue in Mulbekh (3300 meters) I spotted bushes of this Corydalis plant next to the roadside. I couldn’t identify this down to the species level, but I’m not sad about that. After all, the center of diversity of the genus Corydalis is in the Himalayas. If you have a guess about the species, please let me know
Blue lettuce near Lamayuru (3500 m)
Masses of blue lettuce (Lactuca tatarica) were growing wild near the road a little east of Lamayuru. It has a fairly wide range, from Mongolia to eastern Europe, but southwards it stops in Ladakh and Himachal Pradesh. The plant has a wide vertical range here, from a little over 1000 meters to a little over 4000 meters.
Flowers seen around Stok village (3500 m)
The featured photo from Stok village (3500 meters) shows flowers of the Asian Yarrow (Achillea asiatica). Although this isn’t listed in the usual Indian compilations, I’m pretty certain this is what it is, because other compilations give its range as being rather wide, and say that it flowers at these heights in this month.
The purple flower above is the Fireweed (Epilobium angustifolium). I saw this tall plant in hedges around fields in the village. I never really took a photo of this flower, thinking it to be one of the common garden flowers in the primrose family. This photo came from the corner of an exposure which I cropped into what you see once I realized that it is a fairly restricted plant, which is found above 3000 meters and has a range which can go well above 4000 meters.
The yellow flowers in the gallery above belong to a common weed, the Corn Marigold (Glebionis segetum) which is known to grow almost a meter tall. Here I saw them as weeds which were never much more than a third of that height: either people pluck them out to prevent the rapid spread it is known for, or it is stunted by the lack of oxygen at this altitude.
Flowers seen below Hemis monastery
I’ve shown before the Blue globe thistles that I spotted below the Hemis monastery, at an altitude of about 3500 meters. It was a wonderful moment, since I’d spent the previous year searching for them without being able to definitely identify them. This time I was certain because no other globe thistle grows at this altitude.
The slopes were also full of the yellow flowers that you see above. These are most likely to be Cottonweed (Pseudognaphalium affine). I’d noticed bushes of this plant across Ladakh at various altitudes the previous year as well as this time around. The Cottonweed has a wide vertical range and flowers long, right through the summer, and outside it as well, sometimes starting in February and persisting till October. I’d seen them growing as a hemispherical clump in windy areas, and in larger masses of spreading bushes on leeward slopes. Here, below Hemis monastery, they covered large parts of the slopes.
Most of the time I can tell you what a plant isn’t. The photo shows a small herb growing in the meadows around Zoji La, the pass between Kashmir and Ladakh, at a height of about 3500 meters above sea level. I know this definitely isn’t a member of the aster family (Asteraceae). I’m pretty certain it doesn’t belong to the family of peas and legumes (Fabaceae), cucumbers and pumpkins (Cucurbitaceae), carrots or parsley (Apiaceae). I could go on for a long time. But proceeding in this way does not help, since there are 620 families of plants. Clearly I’ll need help to figure this one out. Are you The One Who Knows?
Salt Lover (Halogeton glomeratus)
Western Ladakh was full of small herbs like the one in the featured photo or in the gallery above. They have erect stems branching out from the ground, covered with small leaves and dense flowers. I looked at them in passing and thought the “petals” are modified leaves (bracts) like the “petals” of Bougainvillea or Poinsettia, with the flowers being much smaller structures inside. Unfortunately my eyes were still trying to adjust to the abrupt climb up from the Kashmir valley, I wasn’t carrying either a magnifying glass or a macro lens, and the resolution of my other lenses (good though they are) did not compensate. These small angiosperms (especially the one in the gallery, camoflaged against mammalian eyes) are almost impossible to find in modern compendia. So I rely on the kindness of readers to point me in the right direction.
Thanks to Sophia Alves, I now know a tool which took me quite a way to the correct result. It identified the plant with the yellow flowers correctly as Great Mullein (Verbascum thapsus) in the family Scrophulacriceae (Figworts). It grows at altitudes of up to 4000 meters (that was an important check) and flowers from May to September. The tool didn’t identify the pink flowers correctly, but it led me sufficiently far that I could figure that it is called Salt Lover (Halogeton glomeratus) in the family Amaranthaceae (Amaranths). It grows at heights of up to about 3500 meters and flowers from July to September.
Since we walked through fog for many hours, I couldn’t admire the scenery. I went back to my favourite eye-exercise, looking at plants and flowers. So this is not an exhaustive survey of the flora of Singalila ridge, not a treatise on the key plants in the ecology, but just the things that caught my eye. If I wanted to put a gloss on it, I might call it listing plants along a transect. Our path descended from Tonglu, a little above 3000 meters, to Chitre, a little below 2500 meters. The flora changed considerably over this descent.
Thistles. Click on photos to view
At the upper end of our walk, just below Tonglu, we saw many thistles. It was past their autumn period of seed dispersal, but a few stray silk chutes still clung on to the spiny seed pods. I like to take photos of thistles in summer, during their flowering, and autumn, during seed dispersal. This was the first time I’d seen so many in winter, and I realized this is another good season for photographing thistles. I’m not expert enough to recognize the species from its seed pod in winter. Somewhat lower down I thought I noticed the leaves of an Indian globe thistle.
Rhododendron. Click on photos to view
Less common, but still abundant were the rhododendrons. Kunzum told us that the slopes are red in spring with their flowers, so these must be Rhododendrum arboreum. At the highest part of our walk they grew in single stunted bushes. Lower down they were little forests of short trees. They had begun budding already. I’ve seen seed pods of Rhodos before, so I was very puzzled by these completely different structures on the tree. Rhodos do not let their seeds fly away in the breeze, so what were these plants? I think they are another plant growing in the wind shadow provided by the Rhodo, but I don’t know what they are.
After Meghma we began to see oaks, the Quercus leucotrichophora or Himalayan white oak. They are called banj in the western Himalayas. Kunzum didn’t have a name for it. Growing on them was something that looked like a species of Tillandsia, perhaps even Spanish moss. I was a little hesitant to give it that ID, but then I remembered that this ecosystem was disturbed heavily in colonial times. Pineapple, the most well-known member of the family Bromelaceae, is now grown extensively across Asia, and perhaps no one remembers that it is an exotic. So it is possible that Tillandsia, another member of the family also travelled far.
As we descended the number of species of larger plants definitely increased, and I began to see more and more things that I did not recognize. This plant is certainly in the large family Asteraceae, which bear complex flowers. To recall what is a complex flower, think of a sunflower. Each “petal” is actually a flower all by itself, and its center consists of individual small flowers. They’ve all fused together into what we usually think of as a single flower. This family is so large that I have trouble identifying them all. Any help is always welcome.
Known unknowns. Click on photos to view
Then there were these interesting plants. The first had leaves like a holly. Kunzum told us of a person who’d identified it via Google Lens as Indiana Holly. I don’t think that is a valid identification. All these machine learning algorithms are coverconfident and jump to conclusions. They have trouble telling people that they are not sure what something is. The false holly was entwined with a bush that Kunzum knew of. He scraped the bark with his thumbnail and showed the bright yellow colour of the stem inside. He told us that it was the plant that is used locally to make the yellow colour for religious paintings. The flowers belong to the same plant.
Click on the photo to view
Then, just before we made the final descent to Chitre, we saw two lovely plants. The flowers were growing on a banj tree, but they are clearly not oak flowers. They were a wild orchid. I don’t know the species, but it should be easy to identify since there aren’t many that flower in winter. Next to it is the final puzzle plant that I saw. I hadn’t seen a pine with such long needles in the Himalayas before, but Kunzum was quite certain that many grew around Darjeeling. Later I saw a type specimen in the Lloyd Botanical Garden. It is an exotic, Pinus patula, commonly called the Patula pine or the Mexican weeping pine. With so many exotics, this ecosystem will never go back to what it was before the 19th century botanists came here.
Bunches of bell-like flowers hung just a little above my head on a tangled bank of leaves and stems near the village of Dotiyal (about 1900 m) in Kumaon. The leaves looked like those of the lemon tree that grew in my mother’s garden. I tried to follow the stem back to get an idea of the shape of the plant, but I lost it in the thicket. Later, from my photos I figured that it was Lemon Clematis (Clematis buchananiana, घन्टे फूल).
I hadn’t paid much attention to identifying the family Ranunculaceae, the buttercups, to which it belonged. The family includes the many anemones which you see in the Himalayas. Their flowers have numerous stamens and pistils which are all separate from each other. Everything else is variable. The number of petals in the flower may be five or less (this had four) or numerous. The leaves may be simple (this was) or many-lobed and usually alternate along the stem (this had opposed leaves, as you can see in one of the photos above). The flowers may be radially symmetric (as here) or irregular. I’m unlikely to come across them away from the Himalayas, because they like colder climates than most of India offers.
I was pretty sure that the plant was not a tree, nor a herb. Was it a bush or a vine? The growth was too thick to figure this out. But later I found that it is a vine. Kumaonis use it for everything from curing toothache, to peptic ulcers and cuts. If I were to take up watching wild plants seriously I have to spend more time looking at each. Perhaps I’ll also need to carry a magnifying glass in my pocket.
Don't hold your breath 