Question

Which plant is described by these clues? The genus name was built from Greek words meaning pregnant and flower, because the botanist who coined it thought the swollen bud scales looked heavy with the blooms packed inside them. Ten {stamens} answer only five short lobes on a {corolla} fused into a small pitcher, and each {anther} carries a pair of slender {awns} on its back. Its finest roots are little more than threads packed with a fungal {mycorrhiza} that mines nitrogen straight out of raw acid humus, and the shrub yellows and declines wherever the soil turns limy. Side branches leave the main stems in regular horizontal storeys, so the leafless winter outline reads like a stack of pagoda roofs. Each flower hangs mouth-downward on a slender {pedicel}, and after pollination that same stalk curves upward until the ripening {capsule} stands erect above the twig. Two to six flowers hang together in a nodding {umbel} at the very tip of the shoot, their stalks all radiating from a single point. The thin, papery blades are 2 to 3 inches (5 to 8 cm) long and rimmed the whole way round with fine, even teeth. The {urceolate} flowers are pure white and about 0.4 inch (1 cm) long, without a trace of the coloured veining that marks most of its relatives, and they open in April on nearly naked wood. It grows along forest margins and mountain slopes from central and southern China into northern Vietnam at 2,600 to 5,900 feet (800 to 1,800 m), making a shrub or small tree of 10 to 20 feet (3 to 6 m). Its Chinese name means toothed-edge hanging bell, and that toothed edge is exactly what its Latin epithet records, separating it from the red-veined Japanese species that fills the nursery trade.

Accepted Answer

Enkianthus serrulatus

Name That Plant #073