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Perennial of the Euphorbiaceae family, the cypress spurge is widely spread in Europe, from plains to mountainous levels, where it can rise up to 2,000 meters in altitude in the Alps and the Pyrenees. It thrives in dry grasslands, embankments, edges of light woods, stabilized screes, and rockeries, on poor and well-drained calcareous soils.
It forms low and dense clumps, very branched, from 15 to 40 cm in height, with a colonizing tendency through its creeping rhizomes. The leaves are very numerous, narrowly linear, a soft green almost thread-like, which indeed evoke the foliage of a miniature cypress and give the plant a fine and light texture that is quite characteristic.
The cyathia are borne in terminal umbels with bright yellow-green bracts at the time of flowering, gradually turning orange then red as they age, creating on the same clump a particularly decorative gradient of shades. In autumn, the foliage takes on orange to red tones. In its natural habitat, its flowering extends from April to July depending on the altitude.
In cultivation, it thrives in full sun in poor, dry, and well-drained soil; it tolerates calcareous rockeries and difficult situations where few other plants settle. Its rhizomatous nature can make it invasive in a well-prepared bed. The latex is irritating, as with all spurges.