Flowers of the Himalaya

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A book such as this must inevitably be heavily indebted to the work of earlier botanists and collectors. For the last fifty years the Department of Botany in the British Museum (Natural History) has been a center for work on the Himalayan flora, and recently it has published in conjunction with the University of Tokyo an Enumeration of the Flowering Plants of Nepal. This invaluable publication has greatly helped the authors in the task of preparing the first field guide to the flowers of the Himalaya.

Our thanks go first to Mr J. F. M. Cannon, Keeper of Botany at the Natural History Museum, and to his predecessors in office, who have allowed us to make use of the great collection of Himalayan specimens in the herbarium and of Himalayan literature in the library, also to all members of the staff there who over the years have always assisted us with unfailing courtesy.

We owe a special debt of gratitude to Mr L. H. J. Williams and to Mr A. O. Chater for much help which they have given to us during the periods they were editing the Nepal Enumeration; to Professor H. Hara during his welcome visits to London; and to Miss S Y. Sutton during her long association with the same work.

The Nepal Enumeration and the herbarium at the Museum are arranged in the family order first adopted by Bentham and Hooker. All the older standard Indian botanical publications also follow this order. We have therefore chosen to follow the Bentham and Hooker family order in this book in preference to any of the other orders more recently proposed.

Limits of the country covered by this book

From Nanga Parbat on the Indus the Himalaya stretch eastwards for 2250 km to Namcha Barwa on the bend of the Tsang-Po in South-East Tibet. This book covers only that part of the range which lies within Nepal and the Indian Western Himalaya, a distance of about 1450 km.

The Nepal-Sikkim border has been chosen as the eastern boundary of our area. The Eastern Himalaya beyond this point have a particularly rich and interesting flora, but at the present time few people can go to Bhutan, and virtually no non-Indian to Arunachal Pradesh. Sikkim too was closed while this book was in course of preparation, and although a limited part is now open to tourists from abroad most of it remains inaccessible.

The India-Pakistan border has been chosen as the western boundary of our area. Remnants of the Himalayan flora continue westwards into the mountains of Northern Pakistan, but since the mountain flora of Pakistan also includes many species with a West or Central Asian distribution it has seemed advisable to limit coverage here to Indian territory.

To the north our boundary is the Tibetan border. As will become apparent below, within the country covered by this book there are some quite extensive areas lying to the north of the main Himalayan range which have a climate and flora similar to that of Tibet, and yet are politically a part of Nepal or India. A number of species have therefore been included which are much more typical of the dry Tibetan plateau than of the monsoon Himalaya.

To the south our boundary is based not upon a political border but upon a line of altitude of approximately 1200 m. In order to keep this book within reasonable size it has been necessary to exclude most of the subtropical flora, though a few species have been included which are prominent in the lower valleys and the outer foothills which lie towards the Indian plains.

Even after excluding most of the subtropical species it has been necessary to deal with the flora selectively. In making our selection we have tried to include all those species which are both common and attractive. Opinions may differ as to the latter attribute, and we hope that in the judgement of the public we have not committed too many sins of omission. A certain number of much rarer plants have also been included, though here we have reluctantly been compelled to omit some interesting species, also all the sedges and grasses. There are many species in the Himalaya which, although not native, are naturalized and quite prominent in the flora. A number of these exotics have been included, because it is felt that many people who see them will be unaware that they are not truly Himalayan. Those who know the European flora will notice that some extremely familiar species have been included. They should bear in mind that these plants will probably be quite unknown to a visitor from the Indian plains or from other parts of the world. 1500 species are described in the text; 689 are illustrated photo- graphically; and 316 are illustrated by line drawings.