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Cautleya
Cautleya is a small genus of perennial plants of the family Zingiberaceae (the ginger family), found in the eastern Himalayas through to China and Vietnam. It consists of two species of high-altitude tropical and temperate plants, native to cool forest areas – an unusual habitat for members of the Zingiberaceae. They are grown as ornamental flowering plants.
Both species of Cautleya are in cultivation, along with a number of cultivars and collected forms. When grown in the ground, they are frost-hardy to some degree in climates such as northwest Europe, although a protective covering in winter is advised. A position in at least half shade in a moist, humus-rich soil is recommended. When grown in containers, full protection from frost should be given.
The family Zingiberaceae is mainly tropical in distribution. The unusual mountainous distribution of Cautleya, and the closely related genus Roscoea, may have evolved relatively recently and be a response to the uplift taking place in the area due to the collision of the Indian and Asian tectonic plates in the last 50 million years or so.
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Cautleya by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts are shared under the same licence.
