Common alp-lily

Gagea serotina, formerly known as Lloydia serotina and commonly called the common alp-lily, mountain spiderwort or in Britain the Snowdon lily, is a small, slender, bulbous perennial herb of the family Liliaceae with a circumboreal arctic-alpine distribution, occurring in mountain regions across the northern hemisphere from the Himalayas and the European Alps to Britain, Scandinavia, Siberia, northern Asia and western North America, where it grows on damp rocky ledges, scree, short turf and crevices, typically at high elevation. From a small ovoid bulb 5 to 10 millimetres in diameter sheathed in fibrous tunics the plant produces a single slender erect flowering stem 5 to 15 centimetres tall, accompanied by one or two very narrow grass-like basal leaves up to 15 centimetres long and only about 1 millimetre wide. One or occasionally two erect, bell-shaped flowers 10 to 15 millimetres long are borne at the top of the stem in early summer, with six narrowly elliptic white tepals delicately veined with reddish-purple. The fruit is a small ovoid loculicidal capsule containing numerous small seeds.