Wei Ling Cai

Potentilla chinensis, Chinese cinquefoil, is a tufted perennial herb of the Rosaceae family widespread across China, Korea, Japan, and the Russian Far East, growing on dry grassy slopes, roadsides, and waste ground. The plant develops a stout woody rootstock from which arise multiple ascending to erect, branched, silky-hairy stems thirty to seventy centimeters tall. Leaves are pinnately compound with numerous oblong to oblanceolate leaflets, deeply pinnately cleft, dark green and nearly glabrous above and densely white-tomentose beneath, giving the foliage a strikingly bicolored appearance. Small bright yellow five-petalled flowers about one centimeter across are borne in loose terminal cymes throughout summer, each followed by a dry aggregate of small achenes characteristic of the genus and family.