Potentilla anglicaLaichard.

English cinquefoiltrailing tormentil

WFO wfo-0001017376 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Potentilla anglica, photographed by Jamie Griffiths
fig. a Jamie Griffiths, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-10-17 / obs. 164144875

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Native range 26 botanical countries

Regions where Potentilla anglica is native: Azores, Madeira, Altay, Buryatiya, Chita, Irkutsk, Krasnoyarsk, Türkiye, West Siberia, Yakutiya, Baltic States, Belarus, Belgium, Central European Russia, Corse, Czechia-Slovakia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Türkiye-in-Europe AltayBuryatiyaChitaIrkutskKrasnoyarskTürkiyeWest SiberiaYakutiyaBaltic StatesBelarusBelgiumCentral European RussiaCorseCzechia-SlovakiaDenmarkFinlandFranceGermanyIrelandNetherlandsPolandRomaniaTürkiye-in-Europe AzoresMadeira
Native distribution of Potentilla anglica, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows. Regions too small to draw at this scale are marked with a dot.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Baltic States BLT EUROPE
Belarus BLR
Belgium BGM
Central European Russia RUC
Corse COR
Czechia-Slovakia CZE
Denmark DEN
Finland FIN
France FRA
Germany GER
Great Britain GRB
Ireland IRE
Netherlands NET
Poland POL
Romania ROM
Türkiye-in-Europe TUE
Altay ALT ASIA-TEMPERATE
Buryatiya BRY
Chita CTA
Irkutsk IRK
Krasnoyarsk KRA
Türkiye TUR
West Siberia WSB
Yakutiya YAK
Azores AZO AFRICA
Madeira MDR

Not drawn on the map: Great Britain. We hold no public-domain boundary for this region, so it is listed rather than guessed at.

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 43 in flower of 45 examined

Proportion of examined Potentilla anglica in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 3 3 too few examined
Feb 2 2 too few examined
Mar 2 2 too few examined
Apr 2 3 too few examined
May 3 4 too few examined
Jun 4 4 too few examined
Jul 6 6 100% 61% to 100%
Aug 6 6 100% 61% to 100%
Sep 4 4 too few examined
Oct 1 1 too few examined
Nov 3 3 too few examined
Dec 7 7 100% 65% to 100%

Peak flowering in Jul. Each bar is the share of Potentilla anglica observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 43 of 45 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 9 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Where it actually grows measured, from 208 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -6.5 °C 1.7 °C 12.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 17.2 °C 21.3 °C 29.5 °C
Annual rainfall 436 mm 1,042 mm 2,184 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 4 mm 181 mm 396 mm

It is found where winters bring hard frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 208 research-grade observations of Potentilla anglica that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 18 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

  • Dynamidium procumbens (Sibth. ex Syme) Fourr.
  • Potentilla anglica subsp. nesogenes (Briq.) Gamisans ex Kerguélen
  • Potentilla anglica subsp. nesogenes (Briq.) Gamisans
  • Potentilla anglica var. humilis (Lehm.) Gamisans
  • Potentilla galiciana Schult.
  • Potentilla nemoralis Nestl.
  • Potentilla procumbens prol. salisii (Boreau) Rouy & E.G.Camus
  • Potentilla procumbens subsp. nesogenes Briq.
  • Potentilla procumbens unranked nemoralis Gren.
  • Potentilla procumbens var. humilis (Bertol.) Lehm.
  • Potentilla procumbens var. salisii (Boreau) P.Fourn.
  • Potentilla procumbens var. salisii (Boreau) Briq.
  • Potentilla salisii Boreau
  • Potentilla sylvestris P.Renault
  • Potentilla tormentilla subsp. procumbens Sibth. ex Syme
  • Potentilla tormentilla var. procumbens Sibth. ex Wender.
  • Tormentilla erecta var. procumbens Wahlenb.
  • Tormentilla reptans unranked humilis Bertol.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
  3. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.