Sibbaldia

Sibbaldia 

a genus of plants of the family Rosaceae. The plants are spreading, strongly branched perennial herbs with woody shoots bearing rosettes of temate petiolate leaves and short (1–5 cm tall) flower-bearing stems. The pentamerous flowers are in dense few-flowered cymose inflorescences. The fruit is a multiple nutlet consisting of five to 15 nutlets. There are about ten species (according to other data, as many as 20), distributed in the arctic zone and in the mountains of the temperate zone of Eurasia and North America. The USSR has four or five species. S. procumbens, which is found in the arctic and on bald peaks in Eastern Siberia and the Far East, forms a thick cover on damp, gravelly slopes and placers and near rivers. In the tundra the plant serves as forage for reindeer in the spring and summer. S. parviflora, which grows in the Caucasus, is characteristic of alpine plant cover; it is valuable pasturage for sheep.