When water soaks the surface of the soil, ponds sometime form which gives moisture for plants to live. The roots of plants are not very deep, but there are still many plants that can live in the cold weather that the arctic offers. There exists around 1,700 kinds of plants in the arctic and the subarctic. This includes: low shrubs, sedges, reindeer, mosses, liverworts and grasses. There are 400 varieties of flowers and there is also crustose and foliose lichen.
Plant Adaptaions
All of these plants are adapted to what the arctic has to offer: sweeping winds and disturbances of the soil. Plants are small, short and grouped together to help resist the cold weather and to protect each other form the snow during the long winter. They can still go through photosynthesis when it is warmer and at low light intensities. Since the growing seasons are short, many plants reproduce by budding and division as opposed to reproducing sexually by flowering.