Two brand-new flowers were hiding in plain sight in Sichuan's high meadows

Botanists first noticed the two little gentians back in 2014, growing in the alpine meadows of western Sichuan, on the eastern edge of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau — but proving a flower is truly new to science takes years of checking specimens and DNA. Now the verdict is in: Gentiana tingnongiana, found at ten sites and named for the late taxonomist Tingnong Ho, and the much rarer Gentiana shangwui, a tiny blue flower known only from meadows 3,800 to 4,500 metres up on Balang Mountain, named for the late specialist Shangwu Liu. The team also gave each plant its first conservation grade — tingnongiana as Vulnerable, shangwui as Endangered — because a species cannot be protected until it has a name and a known address. The pair takes the gentian family count to 452 known species.

SDG 15 · Life on land