Wiktionary
n. dense low matted bushes at the tree-line.
Wikipedia
Krummholz or krumholtz ( German: krumm, "crooked, bent, twisted" and Holz, "wood") — also called knieholz ("knee timber") — is a type of stunted, deformed vegetation encountered in subarctic and subalpine tree line landscapes, shaped by continual exposure to fierce, freezing winds. Under these conditions, trees can only survive where they are sheltered by rock formations or snow cover. As the lower portion of these trees continues to grow, the coverage becomes extremely dense near the ground.
Usage examples of "krummholz".
Our equatorial fellfields are becoming meadows, we've even got krummholz, and they're all getting lots of sunlight year-round, and the atmospheric pressure at the foot of the escarpment is as high as in the Himalayas.
When the thickening atmsophere made it possible they had gardened the surrounding terrain, which was rocky and high, not at all easy land, until they lived in the midst of a diffuse dwarfish forest, a bonsai krummholz, with alpine basins in the highlands above it.
It formed a long sinuous hill, running uphill to the horizon, across the high krummholz basins of Tyrrhena.
Our equatorial fellfields are becoming meadows, we’ve even got krummholz, and they’re all getting lots of sunlight year-round, and the atmospheric pressure at the foot of the escarpment is as high as in the Himalayas.
Some rooms held krummholz bansei against their low walls, the trees no higher than their nooks, gnarled by wind, cut along the top at the snow level.
In the sun-filled hollows were krummholz dwarf trees, gnarled over their matted needles.
But on they drove along the wide gravel highway, over the windblown steppes of the Tharsis Bulge, past the farms and towns in Noctis Labyrinthus, up into the krummholz forests of east Tharsis, until Roger fell prey to that feeling one gets near the end of a long journey, that all his life had been part of this trip, that the travelling would never end this side of the grave, that he was doomed to wander over the scenes of all his defeats and failures endlessly, and never come to any place that did not include them all, right in the rearview mirror.
This precipitous opposite shore was thickly forested with spruce and white-bark pine in its lower reaches and had sparse patches of dwarfed and battered krummholz trees and tundra vegetation at the higher elevations.