Potentilla concinnaRichardson

elegant cinquefoil

WFO wfo-0001005411 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Potentilla concinna, photographed by Caleb Catto
fig. a Caleb Catto, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-06-02 / obs. 134085033

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 14 botanical countries

Regions where Potentilla concinna is native: Alberta, Arizona, California, Colorado, Manitoba, Mexico Northeast, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Saskatchewan, South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming AlbertaArizonaCaliforniaColoradoManitobaMexico NortheastMontanaNevadaNew MexicoNorth DakotaSaskatchewanSouth DakotaUtahWyoming
Native distribution of Potentilla concinna, 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
Alberta ABT NORTHERN AMERICA
Arizona ARI
California CAL
Colorado COL
Manitoba MAN
Mexico Northeast MXE
Montana MNT
Nevada NEV
New Mexico NWM
North Dakota NDA
Saskatchewan SAS
South Dakota SDA
Utah UTA
Wyoming WYO

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 349 in flower of 416 examined

Proportion of examined Potentilla concinna in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 1 1 too few examined
Feb 1 1 too few examined
Mar 0 2 too few examined
Apr 100 112 89% 82% to 94%
May 209 211 99% 97% to 100%
Jun 31 60 52% 39% to 64%
Jul 3 18 17% 6% to 39%
Aug 1 4 too few examined
Sep 0 3 too few examined
Oct 1 1 too few examined
Nov 2 3 too few examined
Dec 0 0 too few examined

Peak flowering in May. Each bar is the share of Potentilla concinna 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. 349 of 416 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 8 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 1,993 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -17.4 °C -11.7 °C -10.9 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 21.4 °C 23.3 °C 26.2 °C
Annual rainfall 323 mm 458 mm 630 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 31 mm 36 mm 77 mm

It is found where winters are severely cold. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,993 research-grade observations of Potentilla concinna 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 14 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.

  • Pentaphyllum concinnum (Richardson) Nieuwl. & Lunell
  • Pentaphyllum divisum (Rydb.) Lunell
  • Potentilla beanii Clokey
  • Potentilla concinna f. humifusa Th.Wolf
  • Potentilla concinna var. divisa Rydb.
  • Potentilla concinna var. humifusa Lehm.
  • Potentilla concinna var. humistrata Rydb.
  • Potentilla concinna var. oblanceolata (Rydb.) Soják
  • Potentilla concinna var. typica Th.Wolf
  • Potentilla diversifolia var. proxima (Rydb.) Soják
  • Potentilla divisa (Rydb.) Rydb.
  • Potentilla humifusa Nutt.
  • Potentilla oblanceolata Rydb.
  • Potentilla proxima Rydb.

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.