Rob's plants
home garden plants wildlife seed photos
plant sale journal topics plantlinks fun guestbook

Potentilla argyrophylla

 
Potentilla argyrophylla
Bedewed in early morning
Potentilla argyrophylla

Family rosaceae
Life cycle perennial
Flowers yellow/red (early summer)
From seed germinate at room temperature
detailed seed-starting info below

Typical herbaceous cinquefoil, with strawberry leaves and five-petaled flowers with red markings. Grows a deep taproot, which makes it somewhat challenging to transplant. The species name suggests silver leaves, and indeed they look decidedly silvery and spry when they emerge in the early-spring garden. Later in the season, the silver fades, giving way to plain green pleated foliage, which is still an asset. That's also when the plant starts to do a bit of sprawling, with lax stems venturing a ways away from the main rosette. Flowers appear in late June; they are okay, but fairly short-lived. In my limited experience, the flowers are not the primary reason for growing this plant.

Potentilla argyrophylla
Second-year plant in early spring
Potentilla argyrophylla
By the time the plants flower, they get sprawly, the central tussock is no longer a tight mass of leaves, and the foliage has turned plain green. A haircut may not be a bad idea...

We left this plant behind in our Pennsylvania garden (and wish it well); we don't grow it in Houston.

About my plant portraits
PlantLinks to other web pages about Potentilla argyrophylla


Seed-starting details for this plant

  1. Seed from '12 trade. Baggy 70F (43%G, 6-9d)
  2. Seed from '12 trade. Baggy 70F (36%G, 6d)
  3. Seed from '14 garden, cold-stored. Baggy 70F (75%G, 6-11d)


I welcome comments about my web pages; feel free to use the form below to leave feedback about this particular page. For the benefit of other visitors to these pages, I will list any relevant comments you leave, and if appropriate, I will update my page to correct mis-information. Faced with an ever-increasing onslaught of spam, I'm forced to discard any comments including html markups. Please submit your comment as plain text. If you have a comment about the website as a whole, please leave it in my guestbook. If you have a question that needs a personal response, please e-mail me.

Your name

Your comments