Question

Which plant is described by these clues? Its genus honours a Greek physician at the court of a North African king, said to have first turned the plant's milky sap into medicine. Its species name salutes a young British surgeon-naturalist who botanised across the Himalaya for a trading company before dying in his mid-thirties in the 1840s. Its tiny true flowers hide inside little cup-shaped false-blooms, each a single seed-making flower ringed by pollen-only ones, so what looks like one blossom is really a crowd. Snap any stem or leaf and it bleeds a milky white {latex} that burns and blisters skin and can scar an eye. After bloom it ripens dry, three-lobed pods that split and fling their seeds away from the parent. Each narrow, smooth-edged leaf is split lengthwise by a vivid red midrib that stays visible even out of flower. Deer and grazers leave it untouched, put off by its acrid milky sap. It creeps underground on fleshy {rhizome}s, throwing up fresh reddish stems one to three feet (0.3 to 0.9 m) from the parent each year. In the wild it haunts cool, moist mountain meadows and woodland clearings of the Himalaya at 6,000 to 10,000 feet (1,800 to 3,000 m), from Bhutan and Nepal into southwestern China. A herbaceous perennial 24 to 36 inches (60 to 90 cm) tall, it dies to the ground in winter after blazing red and yellow at leaf-fall. Warm citrus-to-brick-red flower-heads on creeping Himalayan stems set it apart from its acid-yellow Mediterranean relatives, and its two-word common name pairs that fruit colour with a rhyme for 'urge'.

Accepted Answer

Euphorbia griffithii

Name That Plant #042