I was looking at a few plants with a French friend today when we both were stopped in our tracks by this Neolitsea sp. We had wandered past on several prior occasions and admired the trinerved wonderfully glaucous foliage but this is the first time that it had produced any flowers, and they shone from a distance on a rather gloomy and misty morning.

This Neolitsea cuipala has been growing steadily here for the past 15 years or so and has made a shapely tree of about 8m or so. In fact there are two here planted either side of a path where the leaf action can be admired from underneath. Its home is the Upper Siang valley in Arunachal Pradesh, NE India where there is precipitation of some sort on virtually every day of the year. In the higher elevations of the evergreen forest at around 2500m this tree mixes with Rhodo spp. griffithianum and titapuriense, Pleiosorbus, other Lauraceae and a myriad of ferns and other epiphytes all dripping in the moss. Cornwall was doing its best to mimic these rather damp conditions today, it was a treat.