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Silene suecica
Also called Alpine Catchfly, Alpine Pink
Silene suecica (also known as Viscaria alpina) is a species of plant in the family Caryophyllaceae. Its common name is red Alpine catchfly and its natural habitat is the mountains of Norway and Sweden but it is sometimes found near the coasts and it is also found in Great Britain, the Alps and the Pyrenees, Greenland and North America.
Alpine catchfly is found in northern Europe including Norway, Sweden, Finland and Lapland and in the Alps, northern Apennines and the Pyrenees where it grows on rocks including extra-alkaline serpentine rocks, gravel banks beside rivers, sand banks, sea cliffs and nutrient-poor, stony areas. In Greenland and North America it is found on tundra, barren rocky areas, gulleys and riverside shingle, grassy slopes and sea cliffs. In general it thrives where other plants that are less tolerant of high concentrations of copper and heavy metals in the soil do not.
Because of its ability to grow in soils with heavy amounts of copper, Silene suecica is used as a copper content indicator in geobotanical prospecting.
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Silene suecica by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts are shared under the same licence.
