Potentilla campestris(M.E.Jones) Jeps.

field mousetail

WFO wfo-0001002780 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 4 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 4 times, so some figures below are different views of the same plant, taken on the same day, rather than different individuals. They are usually different parts of it: the leaf, the flower, the bark.

Potentilla campestris, photographed by Steve Matson
fig. a Steve Matson, CC BY 4.0 / 2018-06-13 / obs. 84259085
Potentilla campestris, photographed by Steve Matson
fig. b Steve Matson, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 84259113
Potentilla campestris, photographed by Matt Berger
fig. c Matt Berger, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 87240866
Potentilla campestris, photographed by Matt Berger
fig. d Matt Berger, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 52345533
Potentilla campestris, photographed by Matt Berger
fig. e Matt Berger, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 87242271
Potentilla campestris, photographed by Matt Berger
fig. f Matt Berger, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 87242275
Potentilla campestris, photographed by My-Lan Le
fig. g My-Lan Le, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 139363773
Potentilla campestris, photographed by My-Lan Le
fig. h My-Lan Le, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 139363825

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.

The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection

Herbarium
The New York Botanical Garden
Accession
02829761
Filed as
Potentilla campestris Nutt.
Det. by
not recorded on this sheet
Collected
E. C. Twisselmann 1972-07-07
Origin
US
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC BY 4.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 1 botanical country

Regions where Potentilla campestris is native: California California
Native distribution of Potentilla campestris, 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.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
California CAL NORTHERN AMERICA

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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 44 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -12.4 °C -11.3 °C -6.7 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 21.1 °C 22.2 °C 24.5 °C
Annual rainfall 640 mm 761 mm 1,493 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 34 mm 62 mm 67 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 44 research-grade observations of Potentilla campestris 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.

Also published as 6 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.

  • Horkelia campestris (M.E.Jones) Rydb.
  • Horkelia mollis Eastw.
  • Ivesia campestris (M.E.Jones) Rydb.
  • Ivesia mollis (Eastw.) Rydb.
  • Ivesia utahensis var. campestris M.E.Jones
  • Potentilla utahensis var. campestris M.E.Jones

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. USDA PLANTS Database. common name, checklist symbol IVCA2. public domain. 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.