Boykinia richardsonii is a species of flowering plant in the family Saxifragaceae, endemic to Alaska and the adjacent Canadian territory of Yukon.

From a system of dark brown rhizomes spreading underground the plant's stem rises 10–60 centimetres (3.9–23.6 in), with capitate trichomes.

Petals are white, sometimes with pink veins, ovate, 8–12 by 3–7 mm (generally double or triple the lengths of the sepals) with a cuneate or clawed base.

This time both expeditions were successful, with Richardson reaching the Coppermine and Franklin getting as far as Prudhoe Bay in today's Alaska, areas never previously visited by Europeans, and returning.

Hooker noted that its many glands and acute petals made it unlike any other Saxifraga save jamesii, and that "the two might form a distinct little group.

"[11] Constantine Samuel Rafinesque alternatively proposed Hemieva richardsonii in 1837,[10] as part of a genus later accepted as Suksdorfia, based on its floral morphology.

[10] In 1905, Carl Otto Rosendahl suggested that B. richardsonii belonged in a separate section of the genus which he named Renifolium after its distinctive leaf shape.

Richard Gornall of Leicester University and Bruce A. Bohm of the University of British Columbia further expanded the idea into several sections of Boykinia in a 1985 Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society monograph, based on distinctions such as richardsonii's five stamens compared to 10 in other species, three-flowered inflorescence, high polyploidy, and flavonoid profile emphasizing flavones in contrast to the more complex flavonols in the other species.

[13] Three of its vernacular names also recognize Richardson's role in the form of an initial possessive; they differ in what kind of flower to call it.

[7]: 42–43  Others extend it along the Arctic coast into the Northwest Territories to the Coppermine, the area where Richardson's team found the first specimens identified, or the entirety of northern Alaska.

The only difference found in plants from the two regions is the greater equatorial diameter of pollen grains in the Brooks Range samples.

They speculated it might correlate with plants growing in regions that were glaciated during the last Ice Age and those that were not, such as the ANWR, Ivavvik and Vuntut parks along the northern Alaska–Yukon border.

The Beringia refugium created in the areas not glaciated allowed B. richardsonii and some of the other species from these forests to survive in their original range,[6] although they have remained endemic to it long after the glaciers' retreat.

[18] With much less forest cover remaining today in its range, B. richardsonii has adapted to life on the mostly treeless tundra, where it flowers during the brief summer months, from June to August.

[4] A University of Montana graduate student who devoted his master's thesis to the feeding habits of grizzlies on barren ground in the Alaskan Arctic said the species was by far the most popular plant with them (although in some areas the bears ignored it in favor of the local grasses).

Berries, which grizzlies usually turn to foraging in the late summer months as the nutritional content of herbaceous plants declines, were consequently scarce.

But the late snowmelt also resulted in a more abundant growth of richardsonii than usual for August, and Murie saw large patches thoroughly grazed.

"[4] Murie's widow, Louise, said after her 100th birthday, upon the publication of McKinley Flora, a collaboration with her husband that was published in 2012, having been thought lost for half a century, that B. richardsonii was her favorite Denali flower.