A shrub of graceful spreading habit, up to 20 ft high; branches very pithy, green, glabrous. Leaves 10 to 18 in. long, pinnate, consisting of eleven to twenty-three leaflets, which are lanceolate or ovate-lanceolate, 2 to 41⁄2 in. long, 1⁄2 to 11⁄2 in. wide (the terminal one often larger and pinnately lobed); usually deeply and doubly toothed, glabrous above, furnished with loose, simple hairs beneath, especially about the midrib and veins. Flowers ivory white, scarcely 1⁄4 in. wide, produced in terminal pyramidal, branching panicles 1 to 11⁄2 ft long and 8 to 12 in. through; flower-stalks downy.
Native of the Himalaya from Nepal westward, and of Afghanistan and W. Pakistan; it was introduced to Britain by Dr Royle and was flowering in the Horticultural Society’s garden at Chiswick by 1840. A very handsome, robust shrub, it is now less cultivated than its ally S. aitchisonii, from which it differs in its downy flower-stalks, and in the leaflets being broader, doubly toothed, and hairy beneath. From S. sorbifolia it differs in its strong spreading habit.