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.
Oreostylidium subulatum is a tiny, tufted New Zealand alpine plant from the Stylidiaceae family, the only species in its genus. It is grown mainly by specialist alpine and carnivorous plant enthusiasts, and it needs cool, moist, well-drained conditions.
Oreostylidium is a genus of flowering plants in the family Stylidiaceae with a single species, Oreostylidium subulatum, that is endemic to New Zealand. O. subulatum is a very small plant with small, white flowers. It has a complicated botanical history that has led to a few proposals to move Oreostylidium to the related genus Stylidium. The researchers cite molecular data and suspect that this species is an extreme example of floral paedomorphosis. This would not be an unprecedented move since the single species was initially described as Stylidium subulatum in 1864 and later moved to its own genus by Sven Berggren in 1878. It possesses the same kind of glandular trichomes underneath the flower that make Stylidium species carnivorous plants, but it has not yet been tested for the presence of digestive enzymes.
Oreostylidium subulatum is endemic to montane and subalpine regions of New Zealand, but the range is not as extensive as the other Stylidiaceae genera found in New Zealand. Good (1925) in a review of the geographical distribution of Stylidiaceae noted that O. subulatum is confined to the South Island, though earlier reports place some specimens near Mount Ruapehu on the North Island. On the South Island, it was reported as existing at Swampy Hill near Dunedin and The Grampians near Nelson, New Zealand.
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Oreostylidium 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.
