An evergreen shrub of bushy habit up to 3 or 4 ft high; young shoots thickly covered with scurf-like scales and bristly. Leaves oval to oblong, rounded or tapered, and with a short mucro at the apex, 1⁄2 to 11⁄4 in. long, 1⁄4 to 1⁄2 in. wide, the margins decurved; dark glossy green above, clothed beneath with a dense scurfy coating of scales at first whitish, ultimately pale brown; stalk 1⁄8 to 1⁄4 in. long. Flowers densely clustered in a terminal head of eight or more blossoms which is 11⁄2 to 2 in. wide. Each flower is about 2⁄3 in. long and wide, the corolla white, narrowly tubular at the base, spreading at the mouth into five rounded lobes with crinkled margins, the throat filled with white down. Stamens five, 1⁄4 in. long, enclosed within the corolla-tube, slightly downy towards the base; ovary very scaly; style short, glabrous; calyx deeply five-lobed, scarcely half as long as the corolla, the lobes narrowly ovate, scaly outside, fringed with hairs; flower-stalk 1⁄8 in. long, scaly. (s. Anthopogon)
Native of W. Szechwan, N. W. Yunnan, and bordering parts of Tibet and upper Burma at 9,000 to 15,000 ft; discovered by the French missionary Delavay in 1884 and probably introduced by him. Seeds were later sent by Wilson, Forrest, Kingdon Ward and Rock from various parts of its range. It is a very charming dwarf species, very hardy, and flowers in April. In the form first grown in gardens the flowers were white, but more commonly they are pink or flushed with pink. In Kingdon Ward’s 6914 they are deep pink; this is a robust form, introduced from the Seinghku valley, upper Burma.
var. crebreflorum (Hutch. & Ward) Cowan & Davidian R. crebreflorum Hutch. & Ward – A very dwarf variety with pink flowers. Stamens six, with glabrous filaments. It was described from a specimen collected by Kingdon Ward in the Delei valley, Assam Himalaya, in 1928. (KW 8337, ‘A very lovely alpine from rock ledges at 13,000 ft’), but he had introduced it two years earlier from the Seinghku valley, upper Burma (KW 6967, a dwarf shrub only 6 or 8 in. high, growing on precipitous slopes, with rather large flowers, few in each truss, white flushed with pink; collected at 13,000 ft). A plant raised from KW 6967 received an Award of Merit when exhibited by Lt-Col. Messel, Nymans, Sussex, on May 1, 1934.