A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
frost flower
Two things carry this name. On land, a frost flower is a ribbon of ice extruded from the stem of a plant on the first hard freeze, when sap in the stem freezes, expands, splits the stem lengthwise, and keeps pushing out through the crack in curling sheets thinner than paper. On new sea ice, a frost flower is a cluster of ice crystals that grows upward off the surface in fields of small white spikes, fed by vapor rising through the young ice.
Etymology
Both names are English and both were arrived at independently by people describing what they saw. The plant version is also called ice ribbon, ice castle, and rabbit ice or rabbit frost in parts of the American South. The sea-ice version came out of polar science, and the same feature is called ice flowers in several other languages.
Notes
The plant kind lasts a few hours and is destroyed by sunlight, and only a handful of species produce it, notably white crownbeard and dittany. It happens only once or twice a season, on the first freeze while the roots are still drawing water. The sea-ice kind is extremely salty, since the growing crystals wick brine up off the ice surface, and it is a significant source of salt particles in polar air.