Scientific Name
Other Names
Life Form
Synonyms
Family
A wine made from the flowers, known as 'Guranse', is commonly drunk in parts of the Himalayas. The young leaves are astringent and poultice. The flowers are used in the treatment of diarrhoea, dysentery and dyspepsia.
Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan
Forests and shrubberies with Pieris ovalifolia and Quercus incana at altitudes of 1500-3600 m asl.
The national flower of Nepal and the only species of Tree Rhododendron that can grow upto 30 metres tall.
Trees, usually evergreen, up to 30 m tall.
Trunk well-defined; bark gray-brownish, exfoliating into thin and small irregular flakes; young shoots stout, with distinct leaf traces, densely grayish tomentose, glabrescent.
Petiole 10–25 mm with dense fawn indumentum intermixed with glands, sometimes glabrescent; leaf blade leathery, oblong-lanceolate or oblong-oblanceolate, 6–15 × 2–4.5 cm; base cuneate or ± rounded; margin revolute; apex acuminate or acute; abaxial surface with indumentum 1- or 2-layered, densely compacted, white to fawn tomentose, sometimes with loosely floccose brown upper layer, hairs dendroid, glabrescent; adaxial surface reticulate to bullate, glabrous; midrib deeply impressed adaxially; lateral veins 15–26-paired.
Inflorescence dense, ca. 20-flowered, rachis 10–15 mm, tomentose. Pedicel ca. 0.9 cm, pilose, glandular; calyx lobes 5, 1–2 mm, small, triangular, sparsely glandular and hairy; corolla tubular-campanulate, pink to deeply crimson, rarely white, 3.5–4 cm, with 5 black-blotched basal nectar pouches and dark flecks; lobes 5, 1.2–1.7 cm, apex emarginate; stamens 10, unequal, 1.7–2.7 cm, filaments glabrous; ovary conoid, 4–6 mm, white-tomentose, sometimes also glandular; style ca. 3.3 cm, glabrous.
Capsule cylindric, ca. 30 × 6 mm.
Flowering: May
Fruiting: August