Festuca vivipara(L.) Sm.

WFO wfo-0000872559 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Festuca vivipara, photographed by euanmck
fig. a euanmck, CC BY 4.0 / 2020-08-26 / obs. 92324900
Festuca vivipara, photographed by pete_gateley
fig. b pete_gateley, CC0 1.0 / obs. 151439638
Festuca vivipara, photographed by Jacek Pietruszewski
fig. c Jacek Pietruszewski, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 161575084
Festuca vivipara, photographed by Alan Weakley
fig. d Alan Weakley, CC0 1.0 / obs. 149812510
Festuca vivipara, photographed by Terry Instone
fig. e Terry Instone, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 143649523
Festuca vivipara, photographed by nevwright
fig. f nevwright, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 95000118
Festuca vivipara, photographed by Michael D. Pirie
fig. g Michael D. Pirie, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 92139941
Festuca vivipara, photographed by rowan_m
fig. h rowan_m, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 96003108

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Native range 15 botanical countries

Regions where Festuca vivipara is native: Kamchatka, Magadan, West Siberia, Austria, East European Russia, Finland, Føroyar, Great Britain, Iceland, Ireland, North European Russia, Norway, Svalbard, Sweden, Greenland KamchatkaMagadanWest SiberiaAustriaEast European RussiaFinlandIcelandIrelandNorth European RussiaNorwaySvalbardSwedenGreenland Føroyar
Native distribution of Festuca vivipara, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows. Regions too small to draw at this scale are marked with a dot.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Austria AUT EUROPE
East European Russia RUE
Finland FIN
Føroyar FOR
Great Britain GRB
Iceland ICE
Ireland IRE
North European Russia RUN
Norway NOR
Svalbard SVA
Sweden SWE
Kamchatka KAM ASIA-TEMPERATE
Magadan MAG
West Siberia WSB
Greenland GNL NORTHERN AMERICA

Not drawn on the map: Great Britain. We hold no public-domain boundary for this region, so it is listed rather than guessed at.

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Where it actually grows measured, from 194 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -16.6 °C -2.3 °C 5.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 9.7 °C 14.1 °C 16.9 °C
Annual rainfall 902 mm 1,638 mm 3,087 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 164 mm 278 mm 449 mm

It is found where winters are severely cold. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 194 research-grade observations of Festuca vivipara that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one.

Also published as 10 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

  • Festuca brachyphylla f. vivipara Skvortsov
  • Festuca ovina f. villosa-vivipara Rosenv.
  • Festuca ovina f. vivipara (L.) Rosenv.
  • Festuca ovina var. vivipara L.
  • Festuca supina subsp. vivipara (L.) K.Richt.
  • Festuca tenuifolia var. vivipara (L.) Ducommun
  • Festuca villosa-vivipara (Rosenv.) E.B.Alexeev
  • Festuca villosavivipara (Rosenv.) E.B.Alexeev
  • Festuca vivipara subsp. vivipara
  • Festuca vivipara var. vivipara

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
  3. Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.