9 Mar 2018 3 min to read
Blog- Diversity of Plants in Nepal. The view outside my window is uninteresting. The huge dull façade of an apartment hotel perpetually stares at my desk. On its left, a weather information board has two missing digits, probably due to corrupted diodes. On the right side, however, the resident has set up a mini-garden. There are twelve small flower pots on the floor, three hung from an attachment on the ceiling of the recess and three more are attached to the railing on the recess. So, it can be considered not a mini-garden but a micro-garden of some kind. I got the idea to write an article on the diversity of plants in Nepal.
Talking about the plants and flowers, there are marigolds, pothos, tulsi, periwinkle, and dahlia. All of them are common varieties that I can identify except one. Perhaps it is a wild exotic variety, one among the hundreds found in the wild mountain forests of Nepal.
Due to the unique geographical situation of Nepal, you can find not one, not two but seven different physiographical zones in the country. As a result, Nepal is a land of great diversity in terms of flora and fauna. The southern tropical Terai plains are home to the rare serpentina, trumpet flower, broadleaf orchids, and many such exotic plants while the inner Terai with its sub-tropical climate hosts a range of Himalayan broadleaf forests. Once considered notorious as the densest forests full of disease and death until the 1950s, these unique forests are today undergoing massive deforestation due to industrial demands.
Further north, you can find three different climatic zones that feel cramped into a single zone due to the unbelievably short geographical distance. The warm temperate, mild temperate, and cold temperate zones are found within a distance of fewer than fifty kilometers (thirty-one miles). Here plants like Golden Michelia, Himalayan yew, and the much-famed rhododendron are found, among hundreds of others. As you gradually move up, you will find two more climatic zones – the alpine climate and the nival climate where you can find rare flora like spikenard and the Himalayan cordyceps.
Although nobody is certain about the exact number of plant species found on Earth, an educated estimate is that Nepal, which occupies just 0.09 percent of the world’s landmass, is home to around 3 percent of the plant species found on this planet. In numbers that are around ten thousand species – algae, fungi, cryptogam, or phanerogam.
And I wonder what I am doing, sitting inside a room, looking at a static micro-garden when I could be exploring the overwhelming forests of Nepal brimming with dynamism!
For one-day plant-observation trips near Kathmandu, popular destinations are Shivapuri, Nagarjun, Godavari, Kakani, and Gokarna. Popular destinations for seeing plant diversity in Nepal are Chitwan National Park, Manaslu Conservation Area, Vicinity of Lake Rara, Koshi Tappu Wildlife Reserve, and many others.
