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A rare blue-violet flower resembling the Neelakurinji has bloomed along trekking trails in the Kudremukh region of Chikkamagaluru district, Karnataka, drawing trekkers and nature tourists to the Western Ghats.
Observers describe this year's flowering as scattered and limited compared with the much larger blooms recorded in the same landscape in 2022 and 2023.
The Tourism Department has asked visitors not to pluck the flowers, damage the plants or leave waste behind, as the shola-grassland habitat is fragile.
The true Neelakurinji, Strobilanthes kunthiana, was assessed for the IUCN Red List for the first time in 2024 and listed as Vulnerable; its 12-year mass-flowering cycle and the absence of long-term ecological studies had delayed any earlier assessment.
In Kerala, the Mattupetty-Kannimala population's 12-year cycle falls in 2026; flowering began near Chokramudi in July 2026 and the wider spectacle is expected across the Idukki high-altitude grasslands in September and October 2026.
Some plants stay vegetative for many years, store resources, then flower together across an entire population in one season, set seed and die back. Neelakurinji follows this pattern on a roughly 12-year cycle. Flowering together swamps seed predators with far more seed than they can eat and concentrates pollinators into a single short window, which raises the share of seed that survives. The cost is that the population's reproduction depends on a handful of seasons in a human lifetime, so a fire, a landslide or heavy trampling in a flowering year can wipe out a generation's seed.
Simple Analogy: It is the plant equivalent of a village holding one big wedding season every twelve years instead of a few weddings each year: efficient while it works, disastrous if that one season is disrupted.
The kurinji shrublands sit on the high shola-grassland plateaus of the Western Ghats. Kudremukh lies in Karnataka's Chikkamagaluru district, with the national park extending into Dakshina Kannada. The best-known kurinji country is further south, in Kerala's Idukki district around Munnar - Chokramudi, Mattupetty, Sevenmala and Meesapulimala - where the 2026 cycle is under way and peak flowering is expected in September and October 2026. The previous mass flowering of the Chokramudi-Kodaikanal-Poondi landscape was in 2014.
GS Paper 3 > Environment, Biodiversity and Conservation; GS Paper 1 > Indian Physical Geography
General Awareness > Environment and Indian Geography
General Awareness > Environment
A montane ecosystem of the southern Western Ghats in which stunted evergreen shola forest occupies valleys and folds while natural grassland covers the exposed slopes and ridges above roughly 1,400 metres.
A species found naturally in one defined geographical area and nowhere else in the world.
The least severe of the three threatened categories on the IUCN Red List, below Endangered and Critically Endangered, indicating a high risk of extinction in the wild.