四叶茜草 si ye qian cao

Herbs, perennial, or subshrubs, with a rootstock; stems numerous, erect, quadrangular, glabrous, smooth. Leaves in whorls of 4(-6), subsessile or sessile; blade drying subleathery, narrowly lanceolate to linear-lanceolate, 20-50 × 2-5 mm, both surfaces glabrous, smooth, sessile or base narrowed into a very short petiole, margins thickened and retrorsely aculeolate, apex long acuminate; principal vein 1. Inflorescences thyrsoid, with terminal and axillary, several-flowered cymes, shorter than or as long as subtending leaves; peduncles glabrous, 3-10 mm; pedicels 2-5 mm; bracts none or linear, 1-3 mm. Ovary ca. 0.8 mm, smooth. Corolla yellow, rotate; tube 0.2-0.7 mm; lobes lanceolate, 2.3-2.7 mm, acute to mucronate with cusp 0.4-0.6 mm. Mericarp berry black, 3-4 mm in diam. Fl. Jul, fr. Aug.

Sandy lands; ca. 2500 m. Xinjiang [Tajikistan].

We have not seen authentic material of Rubia schugnanica. Pojarkova (loc. cit.) placed it into the small C Asiatic and mostly subshrubby R. ser. Laxiflorae Pojarkova of R. sect. Campylanthera, which we provisionally include in R. sect. Rubia.