Edelweiss

Edelweiss is a small, perennial flowering plant native to the high mountain ranges of Europe, most famously the Alps, growing in rocky, well-drained soil at high altitude where few other plants survive. Its true flowers are small and yellow, clustered at the center of the plant, but they are surrounded by a distinctive rosette of woolly, star-shaped white bracts that give the plant its familiar and much-photographed appearance, an adaptation of dense fine hairs believed to protect it from cold, wind, intense ultraviolet radiation and moisture loss at altitude. Because of its association with remote, difficult-to-reach alpine terrain, edelweiss became a popular symbol of mountaineering skill and courage in nineteenth-century Europe, and it holds strong cultural significance in Austria and Switzerland, where it appears on coins, military insignia and national emblems. Overpicking by admirers seeking the flower as a keepsake, combined with its naturally slow growth and narrow habitat, led to legal protection of wild edelweiss across much of its range, though the species remains widely available through cultivation for gardens and the horticultural trade.