Potentilla effusa (branched cinquefoil)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Potentilla effusa, photographed by mfeaver — fig. a mfeaver, CC BY 4.0 / 2018-07-02 / obs. 20876370

Potentilla effusa, photographed by Todd Boland — fig. b Todd Boland, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 113398164

Potentilla effusa, photographed by Kevin Judge — fig. c Kevin Judge, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 177299712

Potentilla effusa, photographed by Cecelia Alexander — fig. d Cecelia Alexander, CC0 1.0 / obs. 205529165

Potentilla effusa, photographed by Christine Laney — fig. e Christine Laney, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 138810027

Potentilla effusa, photographed by lazarus — fig. f lazarus, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 139575721

Potentilla effusa, photographed by Jon Ferreira — fig. g Jon Ferreira, CC0 1.0 / obs. 130759160

Potentilla effusa, photographed by Kate — fig. h Kate, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 85568433

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 12 botanical countries

Native distribution of Potentilla effusa, 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.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Alberta	ABT	NORTHERN AMERICA
Colorado	COL
Idaho	IDA
Manitoba	MAN
Minnesota	MIN
Montana	MNT
Nebraska	NEB
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 119 in flower of 229 examined

59%

86%

26%

Proportion of examined Potentilla effusa in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	0	too few examined
Feb	0	0	too few examined
Mar	0	0	too few examined
Apr	0	17	0%	0% to 18%
May	1	25	4%	1% to 20%
Jun	58	98	59%	49% to 68%
Jul	55	64	86%	75% to 92%
Aug	5	19	26%	12% to 49%
Sep	0	5	0%	0% to 43%
Oct	0	1	too few examined
Nov	0	0	too few examined
Dec	0	0	too few examined

Peak flowering in Jul. Each bar is the share of Potentilla effusa 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. 119 of 229 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 6 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 557 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-16.3 °C	-11.7 °C	-9.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	20.5 °C	23.4 °C	26.1 °C
Annual rainfall	375 mm	468 mm	969 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	33 mm	39 mm	197 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 557 research-grade observations of Potentilla effusa 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 10 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 effusum (Douglas ex Lehm.) Lunell
Potentilla coloradensis Rydb.
Potentilla effusa var. coloradensis (Rydb.) Th.Wolf
Potentilla effusa var. filicaulis Nutt.
Potentilla effusa var. gossypina Nutt.
Potentilla filicaulis (Nutt.) Rydb.
Potentilla gossypina (Nutt.) Nutt. ex Hook.
Potentilla hippiana subsp. effusa (Douglas ex Lehm.) Dorn
Potentilla hippiana var. effusa (Douglas ex Lehm.) Dorn
Potentilla hippiana var. filicaulis (Nutt.) B.Boivin

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
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.