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.
Boykinia richardsonii
Also called Alaska Boykinia, Richardsons Brookfoam
Richardson's brookfoam is a small perennial woodland and tundra-edge herb native to Alaska and the Yukon, grown mainly by enthusiasts and native-plant gardeners. It spreads by underground rhizomes and does best in cool, moist, shaded conditions.
Boykinia richardsonii is a species of flowering plant in the family Saxifragaceae, endemic to Alaska and the adjacent Canadian territory of Yukon. It is commonly known as Richardson's brookfoam, but has also been called Alaska boykin, bearflower, Richardson's boykin and Richardson's saxifrage. "Bearflower" reflects its popularity with grizzly bears as forage in the summer months when it flowers.
The species is named for Scottish naturalist John Richardson, who first identified it on his mid-1820s exploration of the western Canadian Arctic coast with John Franklin. William Jackson Hooker first described it in Flora Boreali-Americana, the 1833 account of plant species identified on that expedition. It was originally misclassified as part of the genus Saxifraga.
Delineations of the species' range vary but most agree on an area running across the Alaska North Slope into the foothills of the Brooks Range up to elevations of 400 m (1,300 ft), thence across the Canada–United States border through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) into northern Yukon and Ivvavik National Park, where it turns south through Vuntut National Park, then bending southwest through the Porcupine River valley to finish at the Alaska Range, found as high up the slopes as 1,700 m (5,600 ft) in Denali National Park and Preserve. Some maps show isolated areas on the Seward Peninsula and the Norton Sound coast. Others extend it along the Arctic coast into the Northwest Territories to the Coppermine, the area where Richardson's team found the first specimens identified, or the entirety of northern Alaska.
Allegheny brookfoam · Sierra brookfoam · Large boykinia · Coastal brookfoam · Roundleaf brookfoam · Brookfoam
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Boykinia richardsonii 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.
