Plant Story--Shrubby Cinquefoil, Dasiphora fruticosa

The cinquefoils are easily recognized and found all around the world. There are about 400 species of cinquefoil, genus Potentilla (rose family, Rosaceae). They have five petals, like a basic rose flower, but never have thorns. The most common one in Europe had five-lobed leaves as well as five-petaled flowers, so was called cinque-foil, meaning 5-(lobed)-leaf. American species--about 98 native species!, tend to have more lobes than five, so the name carried over but doesn't fit very well.

In North America, almost all the cinquefoils/ Potentilla species are herbs, nonwoody plants. 

So I easily learned shrubby cinquefoil, Potentilla fruticosa, because it shares the flower and leaf shape, but is a shrub, the only shrubby cinquefoil in Colorado (and the U.S.) Since it was (is) so distinctive, I shouldn't have been surprised that taxonomists, revising the very big genus Potentilla, gave the shrubby cinquefoils a genus of their own; Potentilla fruticosa became Dasiphora fruticosa. The shrubby cinquefoil group, Dasiphora, is a genus of about 12 species. Only one is found wild in North America, the others are Eurasian. Since Potentilla is a very confusing group, separating out the shrubby cinquefoils made Potentilla a little more uniform (no shrubs!).