Salix rotundifoliaTrautv.

least willow

WFO wfo-0000930218 Accepted WFO 2026-06 7 photographs CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–g · 4 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 4 times, so some figures below are different views of the same plant, taken on the same day, rather than different individuals. They are usually different parts of it: the leaf, the flower, the bark.

Salix rotundifolia, photographed by Matt Bowser
fig. a Matt Bowser, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-06-30 / obs. 176590637

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.

The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection

Herbarium
The New York Botanical Garden
Accession
02210007
Filed as
Salix rotundifolia Trautv.
Det. by
D. E. Atha 2013-01-01
Collected
D. E. Atha 2013-06-18
Origin
US
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC BY 4.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 8 botanical countries

Regions where Salix rotundifolia is native: Magadan, Yakutiya, Alaska, Aleutian Is., Montana, Northwest Territories, Wyoming, Yukon MagadanYakutiyaAlaskaMontanaNorthwest TerritoriesWyomingYukon
Native distribution of Salix rotundifolia, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Alaska ASK NORTHERN AMERICA
Aleutian Is. ALU
Montana MNT
Northwest Territories NWT
Wyoming WYO
Yukon YUK
Magadan MAG ASIA-TEMPERATE
Yakutiya YAK

Not drawn on the map: Aleutian Is.. 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 54 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -30.5 °C -14.7 °C -1.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 7.8 °C 12.0 °C 13.7 °C
Annual rainfall 240 mm 1,101 mm 2,088 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 23 mm 139 mm 264 mm

It is found where winters are arctic. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 54 research-grade observations of Salix rotundifolia 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 6 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.

  • Salix dodgeana Rydb.
  • Salix leiocarpa (Cham.) Coville
  • Salix polaris var. leiocarpa Cham.
  • Salix rotundifolia subsp. dodgeana (Rydb.) Argus
  • Salix rotundifolia subsp. rotundifolia
  • Salix rotundifolia var. rotundifolia

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. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. 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.