Broadtooth lady's mantle

Alchemilla subcrenata, the broadtooth lady's mantle, is a perennial herb in the family Rosaceae belonging to the highly polymorphic Alchemilla vulgaris species aggregate, in which dozens of microspecies are recognized as morphologically distinct entities that reproduce by apomixis (asexual seed formation). It occurs across northern and central Europe, including Britain, Scandinavia, the Alps, and the Carpathians, growing in damp meadows, mountain pastures, streamsides, and grassy roadside verges, usually on base-rich substrates. The plant produces a stout woody rootstock and a basal rosette of long-petioled leaves with strongly developed silky pubescence on the petioles. The leaf blade is rounded reniform, 4-10 cm across, palmately 9-11-lobed, with the lobes broad and shallowly cut to about a quarter or third of the way to the base, the lobe margins coarsely and bluntly toothed (the broad teeth giving the common name), the upper surface sparsely silky-hairy and the lower surface densely silky beneath. The flowering stems are ascending, 15-45 cm tall, branched in the upper portion. Flowers are very small (3-4 mm), apetalous, with four greenish-yellow sepals and an epicalyx of four smaller sepal-like segments, borne in loose terminal corymbose cymes. The fruit is a small dry achene enclosed by the persistent hypanthium.