The open plant encyclopedia
Snap a photo or search by any name to see how to care for it, where it comes from, whether it's safe, and a 3D model you can turn.
The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.
Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.
Arctous alpina
Also called Mountain Bearberry, Arctic Bearberry
Alpine bearberry is a low, creeping dwarf shrub from cold northern and mountain regions, usually under 15 cm tall. It is a wild alpine plant rarely grown in gardens, so care depends on mimicking cool, open, moist-but-well-drained tundra conditions.
Arctous alpina (syn. Arctostaphylos alpina), the alpine bearberry, mountain bearberry or black bearberry, is a dwarf shrub in the heather family Ericaceae. The basionym of this species is Arbutus alpina L..
Arctous alpina has a circumpolar distribution. It is found at high latitudes, from Scotland east across Scandinavia, Russia, Alaska, Northern Canada and Greenland. Its southern limits in Europe are the Pyrenees and the Alps, in Asia, the Altay Mountains and Mongolia, and in North America, British Columbia in the west, and Maine and New Hampshire in the east. Its natural habitat is moorland, dry forests with birch and pine and hummocks covered in moss at the edges of bogs.
The rather flavorless berries are used as food by Alaska Natives, although researchers studying the Siberian Yupiks have speculated that they may be avoided due to the possibility of causing poisoning.
Santa Cruz manzanita · Mt. Diablo manzanita · Baker's manzanita · Cerro Bola manzanita · Hoary manzanita · Santa Catalina Island manzanita · Hairy manzanita · Santa Rosa Island manzanita · Brittleleaf Manzanita · La Cruz manzanita · Vine Hill manzanita · Little Sur manzanita
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Arctous alpina by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
