Willd.
Description
Sibbaldia parviflora is a low alpine herb with a broad distribution spanning the Caucasus, Anatolia, Iran, Central Asia and the Himalaya, recorded from Russia, Georgia, Armenia, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Iran, Afghanistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan and China, with scattered European and other collections reflecting cultivation and herbarium material. Its roughly 662 georeferenced records mark a common and wide-ranging mountain species. It grows in alpine meadows, short grassy turf, stony slopes and grazed pasture, typically at about 2700-4500 m. The collection from Panwali in Garhwal, India at 3300 m in June is representative of its early-summer flowering on open Himalayan pasture.
It is a small, tufted, somewhat hairy perennial growing from a stout, branched, woody rootstock that gives rise to crowded rosettes. The leaves are trifoliolate with obovate to cuneate leaflets that are toothed at the truncate apex, often silky-pubescent and greyish-green. The small flowers are clustered in compact cymes on short scapes; each has five sepals alternating with an epicalyx and five small, narrow, pale yellow to whitish petals shorter than the sepals, hence parviflora, with five to ten stamens and few carpels seated on a slightly hairy receptacle. The fruit is a small cluster of dry glabrous achenes.
Sibbaldia is a small genus of cushion- and mat-forming alpine herbs closely allied to Potentilla, and recent molecular work has both narrowed and reshaped its limits; S. parviflora remains among its core species. The dwarf rosette habit and reduced flowers are adaptations to cold, grazed, high-radiation alpine environments, and pollination is by generalist alpine insects. Given its very wide trans-Asian range and tolerance of grazing, it is of least conservation concern.
Author: Willd. · Sources: POWO (Kew), GBIF, Flora of China, Flora of Pakistan, Sibbaldia phylogeny (Smedmark) monograph