Distributed widely in alpine and arctic environments around the North Atlantic Ocean, it is one of the smallest woody plants.

Salix herbacea is adapted to survive in harsh environments, and has a wide distribution on both sides of the North Atlantic, in arctic northwest Asia, northern Europe, Greenland, and eastern Canada, and further south on high mountains, south to the Pyrenees, the northern Apennines, the Alps and the Rila in Europe, and the northern Appalachian Mountains in the eastern United States.

It grows in tundra and rocky moorland, usually at over 1,500 metres (5,000 feet) elevation in the south of its range but down to sea level in the Arctic.

The leaves are deciduous, rounded, crenate to toothed and shiny green with paler undersides, 0.3–2 cm long and broad.

[1][2][4]: 382 [5]: 88  In colder biomes with habitat fragmentation, geographic isolation, and heterogeneous availability of resources, the dwarf willow often exhibits clonal propagation[6] of genets in which ramets are physiologically integrated and thereby share resources.