Saxifraga serpyllifoliaPursh

thymeleaf saxifrage

WFO wfo-1000061515 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 6 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 6 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.

Saxifraga serpyllifolia, photographed by Jason Grant
fig. a Jason Grant, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-07-27 / obs. 146766894

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
Smithsonian, US National Herbarium
Accession
US 2440797
Filed as
Saxifraga serpyllifolia Pursh
Det. by
Shetler, Stanwyn G., (US), NMNH
Collected
J. M. Campbell 1959-07-17
Origin
US
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC0 1.0)

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 10 botanical countries

Regions where Saxifraga serpyllifolia is native: Kamchatka, Krasnoyarsk, Magadan, Yakutiya, Alaska, Aleutian Is., British Columbia, Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Yukon KamchatkaKrasnoyarskMagadanYakutiyaAlaskaBritish ColumbiaNorthwest TerritoriesNunavutYukon
Native distribution of Saxifraga serpyllifolia, 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
British Columbia BRC
Northwest Territories NWT
Nunavut NUN
Yukon YUK
Kamchatka KAM ASIA-TEMPERATE
Krasnoyarsk KRA
Magadan MAG
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 161 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -35.0 °C -24.9 °C -11.7 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 7.5 °C 11.3 °C 15.7 °C
Annual rainfall 383 mm 906 mm 1,615 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 51 mm 108 mm 244 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 161 research-grade observations of Saxifraga serpyllifolia 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 14 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.

  • Evaiezoa esholtzi Raf.
  • Evaiezoa serpyllifolia (Pursh) Raf.
  • Hirculus serpyllifolius (Pursh) W.A.Weber
  • Leptasea serpyllifolia (Pursh) Small
  • Saxifraga bicolor Sternb.
  • Saxifraga eschscholtzii Cham. ex DC.
  • Saxifraga fischeri Ser.
  • Saxifraga glutinosa Sipliv.
  • Saxifraga pallasiana Sternb.
  • Saxifraga scapigera Willd. ex Sternb.
  • Saxifraga serpyllifolia f. purpurea (Hultén) B.Boivin
  • Saxifraga serpyllifolia subsp. glutinosa (Sipliv.) Kozhevn.
  • Saxifraga serpyllifolia var. purpurea Hultén
  • Saxifraga serpyllifolia var. viscosa Trautv.

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. USDA PLANTS Database. common name, checklist symbol SASE7. public domain. 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.