Potentilla intermediaL.

downy cinquefoil

WFO wfo-0000985471 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Potentilla intermedia, photographed by Tatiana Strus
fig. a Tatiana Strus, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-11 / obs. 205770376

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 intermedia is native: Altay, Irkutsk, Khabarovsk, Krasnoyarsk, West Siberia, Baltic States, Belarus, Central European Russia, East European Russia, North European Russia, Northwest European Russia, Poland, South European Russia, Ukraine AltayIrkutskKhabarovskKrasnoyarskWest SiberiaBaltic StatesBelarusCentral European RussiaEast European RussiaNorth European RussiaNorthwest European RussiaPolandSouth European RussiaUkraine
Native distribution of Potentilla intermedia, 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
Baltic States BLT EUROPE
Belarus BLR
Central European Russia RUC
East European Russia RUE
North European Russia RUN
Northwest European Russia RUW
Poland POL
South European Russia RUS
Ukraine UKR
Altay ALT ASIA-TEMPERATE
Irkutsk IRK
Khabarovsk KHA
Krasnoyarsk KRA
West Siberia WSB

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 66 in flower of 131 examined

Proportion of examined Potentilla intermedia 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 8 0% 0% to 32%
May 4 25 16% 6% to 35%
Jun 31 36 86% 71% to 94%
Jul 12 14 86% 60% to 96%
Aug 9 19 47% 27% to 68%
Sep 8 20 40% 22% to 61%
Oct 1 7 14% 3% to 51%
Nov 1 1 too few examined
Dec 0 1 too few examined

Peak flowering in Jun. Each bar is the share of Potentilla intermedia 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. 66 of 131 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 5 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 2,009 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -21.7 °C -10.9 °C -7.9 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 20.9 °C 22.9 °C 24.3 °C
Annual rainfall 479 mm 676 mm 820 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 57 mm 107 mm 135 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 2,009 research-grade observations of Potentilla intermedia 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 15 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.

  • Potentilla diffusa Rchb.
  • Potentilla digitatoflabellata A.Braun & C.D.Bouché
  • Potentilla heidenreichii Zimmeter
  • Potentilla intermedia f. autumnalis Petunn.
  • Potentilla intermedia subsp. heidenreichii (Zimmeter) Tzvelev
  • Potentilla intermedia unranked campestris Fr.
  • Potentilla intermedia var. canescens (Besser) Rupr.
  • Potentilla intermedia var. composita Rupr.
  • Potentilla intermedia var. heidenreichii (Zimmeter) Focke
  • Potentilla intermedia var. tambowensis Th.Wolf
  • Potentilla intermedia var. typica Rupr.
  • Potentilla norvegica var. varians Th.Wolf
  • Potentilla ruthenica Steud.
  • Potentilla varians Moench
  • Potentilla visurgina Weihe ex Rchb.

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.