Leucosceptrum canum Sm.

A honey plant.

Plants 1.5-7 m tall, bark gray-yellow or brown, exfoliating; branches densely gray or yellowish tomentose when young, brownish, puberulent or subglabrous with age. Petiole 1.5-3(-4.5) cm, densely yellowish tomentose; leaf blade elliptic-lanceolate, 10-23 × 5-9 cm, papery, densely gray or yellowish tomentose-stellate/floccose when young, adaxially glabrescent or puberulent on midrib, base cuneate, margin serrate or sometimes crenate, apex acuminate. Spikes 10-13 cm, dense, cylindric, densely stellate-tomentose; verticillasters 6- to many flowered; bracts acute, margin entire or irregularly crenate, deciduous in fruit. Pedicel ca. 1 mm. Calyx 6-8 mm, densely yellowish stellate-tomentose, tuberculate, glabrous inside, teeth to 1.5 mm. Corolla 8-9 mm, stellate-tomentose outside. Nutlets smooth abaxially, with sparse ± transparent tubercles adaxially. Fl. Nov-Mar, fr. Mar-May.

Hinmalaya (Kumaun to Bhutan), Assam, Burma, S. W. China(Yunnan).

Sichuan, Xizang, Yunnan [Bhutan, India, Laos, Myanmar, Nepal, Vietnam]

1000-2800 m

Dry open waste areas, forest margins, valley streamsides, second growth forests, thickets; 1000-2600 m.

Clerodendrum leucosceptrum D. Don; Comanthosphace nepalensis Kitamura & Murata; Teucrium macrostachyum Wallich ex Bentham.