Armeria alpina aka Alpine Thrift

Armeria alpina, commonly called Alpine Thrift or Mountain Thrift, is a small herbaceous perennial in the leadwort family (Plumbaginaceae). It forms tight, evergreen cushions or tufts built from dense basal rosettes of around twenty-five narrow, mostly hairless leaves. From these mats rise slender, leafless flowering scapes that lift rounded heads of bright pink, five-petalled flowers — a characteristic globe-shaped inflorescence held on long pedicels above the foliage. Plants typically reach only 7 to 30 centimetres in height, giving them the low, ground-hugging silhouette typical of alpine species shaped by wind, cold, and thin soils.

The species is native to the high mountains of southern and central Europe, with a range that spans the Pyrenees of France and Spain, the Alps of France, Italy, Austria and Switzerland, the Carpathians, and the northern Balkan Peninsula, extending into Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and Ukraine. Plants of the World Online classifies it as a perennial herb of the temperate biome. In the wild it grows on rocks, gravel and short alpine meadows between roughly 1,400 and 2,700 metres above sea level, where it tolerates intense sun, lean stony substrates, and a short summer growing window.

Flowering is concentrated in the alpine summer, generally from July into August, when the plants produce their familiar pink pompon heads on wiry stems. Several infraspecific taxa are recognised, including subsp. alpina, subsp. bubanii, and subsp. occasiana, alongside the regionally recognised subsp. purpurea. Older botanical literature treated the plant as a subspecies or variety of Armeria maritima, and many of those names — Armeria maritima subsp. alpina, Statice armeria var. alpina (the basionym), Statice alpina, Armeria vulgaris var. alpina — remain in use as synonyms. In its Swiss range, InfoFlora rates the species as Least Concern at national level, although it is classed as Regionally Extinct in the lowland Mittelland and Near Threatened in the western Central Alps. It is not listed in the IUCN Global Invasive Species Database.