三脉猪殃殃 san mai zhu yang yang

Herbs, perennial, erect, 5-25 cm tall, emerging from filiform rhizomes. Stems mostly unbranched, 4-angled, glabrous to sparsely hispidulous. Leaves in whorls of 4, sessile or subsessile; blade drying blackish brown and papery, broadly elliptic, ovate, or suborbicular, 10-25 × 6-17 mm, glabrous to hispidulous at least on veins, otherwise adaxially smooth, abaxially not glandular-striate, base cuneate to obtuse, margins antrorsely ciliolate or hispidulous, apex ± rounded and usually mucronate; principal veins 3, palmate. Inflorescences small, thyrsoid, cymes terminal and in axils of uppermost leaves, 2-6 cm, few to several flowered, lax; peduncles glabrous, smooth; bracts leaflike or ligulate to narrowly elliptic, 0.5-4 mm; pedicels 1-5 mm. Ovary subglobose, ca. 1 mm, densely pubescent with spreading uncinate trichomes. Corolla white or greenish yellow, rotate, 2.5-3(-4) mm in diam., glabrous, lobed for 3/4 or more; lobes 4, elliptic-lanceolate or ovate-triangular, acute. Mericarps ovoid, 1.5-2 mm, with dense uncinate trichomes 0.8-1 mm, on pedicels usually elongating to 15 mm. Fl. and fr. Jul-Sep.

Forests on mountains, tussocks at ditch sides; 1500-2300 m [as low as ca. 100 m in N Japan]. Heilongjiang, Jilin [Japan, Korea, NE Russia; NW North America].

Galium kamtschaticum is an amphi-Beringian member of G. sect. Platygalium and forms a related species group with G. chekiangense in SE China, G. nakaii in Japan, and G. oreganum in W North America. In the Flora of Japan (Yamazaki, Fl. Japan 3a: 206-240. 1993) three varieties are recognized, one of them endemic to Japan, the second extending to Sakhalin and the Kuriles, and only var. kamtschaticum more widespread and extending to the NE provinces of China. Specimens from SE China, Zhejiang, that were determined as G. kamtschaticum and those from Fujian that were listed by W. C. Chen (in FRPS 71(2): 265. 1999) as G. nakaii differ from typical G. kamtschaticum by their leaves drying somewhat leathery, greenish-brownish, papillose, glandular-striate abaxially, and by their fruit with short hairs 0.1-0.2 mm, with a bent but not hooked tip. In the present flora they are treated as a new species, G. chekiangense (see the comments under that species).