Whitelady

Cultivated for its showy, evanescent flowers.

A slender, herbaceous twiner or climber with quadrangular strigose young shoots. Leaves with 2-4.5 cm long, slender petiole; lamina broadly elliptic to ovate or lanceolate-ovate, (3-) 4-10 x (1.5) 2-5 (-6) cm, entire or few toothed, sparsely strigose on both sides near the truncate to cordate base, palmately 3-5-nerved, acute-acuminate. Flowers white, 4-5 cm long, c. 5 cm across, solitary axillary, on 2-7 cm long stout pedicels; bracts connate and spathaceous, oblong-lanceolate, 1.5-2 cm x c. 6-8 mm, ± acute, hairy. Calyx cupular with 12-16, subulate, 1-3 mm long, glandular hairy teeth. Corolla tube cylindrical, 2-2.5 cm long; lobes 5, subequal, nearly as long as tube, puberulous outside. Staminal filaments glandular-hairy below; anthers oblong, slightly beaked above, without spur at base. Style c. 2 cm long. Capsule depressed globose, c. 8 mm across, scabrid, puberulent, with 1-1.5 cm long beak. Seeds reticulate.

Himalaya (Nepal, Sikkim), India, Ceylon, Burma, Indo-China, W. China.

Distribution: Indo-China, Burma, Nepal, India, N. Australia and W. China; introduced and naturalized in the neotropics.

500-1800 m

Fl. Per.: October-December.

Thunbergia fragrans Specimen in jharkhand, India

Thunbergia fragrans, the whitelady is a perennial climbing twiner in the genus Thunbergia, native to India and Southern Asia.