Potentilla grandiflora

Plate 1 figs. a–g · 2 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 2 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 grandiflora, photographed by Yves Bas — fig. a Yves Bas, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-08-11 / obs. 162386422

Potentilla grandiflora, photographed by Emanuele Santarelli — fig. b Emanuele Santarelli, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 89554883

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: Smithsonian, US National Herbarium
Accession: US 812572
Filed as: Potentilla grandiflora L.
Det. by: not recorded on this sheet
Collected: C. Ozanon 1858-08-03
Origin: FR
The sheet: View the digitised specimen (CC0 1.0)

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 4 botanical countries

Native distribution of Potentilla grandiflora, 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
Austria	AUT	EUROPE
France	FRA
Italy	ITA
Switzerland	SWI

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 95 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-19.4 °C	-14.5 °C	-10.9 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	11.7 °C	14.8 °C	16.9 °C
Annual rainfall	1,201 mm	1,510 mm	2,335 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	163 mm	265 mm	428 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 95 research-grade observations of Potentilla grandiflora 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 29 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.

Fragaria grandiflora (L.) Lam.
Potentilla fragiformis Willd. ex Spreng.
Potentilla fragiformis var. parviflora Trautv.
Potentilla gallica Siegfr.
Potentilla grandiflora f. minor (Venetz ex Ser.) Th.Wolf
Potentilla grandiflora f. stenopetala Th.Wolf
Potentilla grandiflora f. stenophylla Briq. ex Zimmeter
Potentilla grandiflora prol. pedemontana (Boiss. & Reut.) Th.Wolf
Potentilla grandiflora subsp. pedemontana (Boiss. & Reut.) Nyman
Potentilla grandiflora subvar. minor (Venetz ex Ser.) Rouy & E.G.Camus
Potentilla grandiflora subvar. stenophylla (Briq. ex Zimmeter) Th.Wolf
Potentilla grandiflora var. cinereosericea Schmidely
Potentilla grandiflora var. fragiformis Ser.
Potentilla grandiflora var. genuina Burnat & Briq.
Potentilla grandiflora var. minor Gaudin
Potentilla grandiflora var. minor Venetz ex Ser.
Potentilla grandiflora var. parviflora (Trautv.) Trautv.
Potentilla grandiflora var. pedemontana (Boiss. & Reut.) Gremli ex Burnat & Briq.
Potentilla grandiflora var. pedemontana (Boiss. & Reut.) Gremli
Potentilla pedemontana Boiss. & Reut.
Potentilla polymorpha var. major Griess.
Potentilla porrigens (Rchb.) Zimmeter
Potentilla subnitens Arv.-Touv.
Potentilla tabernaemontani subvar. porrigens (Rchb.) Th.Wolf

and 5 more.

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.
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.