Marrubium marrubiastrum - Alpine Horehound

Alpine Horehound is a distinctive high alpine plant with flowers borne at branch-ends, in spike-like clusters of congested verticillasters, densely white-woolly, 2-6 cm long. Flowers are about 5 mm, long, brownish yellow, peeping out from the mass of white-woolly sepals and bracts. They are narrow tubular, externally hairy; upper lobe 1 mm, entire, rounded, straight; lower lip with 3 short lobes; tube straight, narrow. Stamens do not protrude out. Sepal-cup is narrow tubular - funnel-shaped, 8-10 mm, firm-textured, not two-lipped; teeth 5, all equal, 2.5-3 mm, spine-tipped. Bracts are thread-like, subulate, shorter than sepals. Stems are several, usually unbranched, 10-15 cm, rising up or erect, four-edged, purplish or not, densely white woolly when young. Leaves are mostly basal or not, 1-2 x 1-2 cm, broadly ovate to almost circular in outline, deeply lobed, with a dense or very dense woolly indumentum of long hairs on both surfaces and stalkless oil globules below; leaf-stalk 1-1.5 cm. Nutlets are 2.5 x 1.6 mm, greyish, triquetrous, at tip rounded. Alpine Horehound is found in SW Siberia to Mongolia and Ladakh. Flowering: August-September.