Shrubby Cinquefoil Dasiphora fruticosa
Shrubby Cinquefoil is a perennial shrub native to Alaska, Canada, and the lower 48 states. It grows to 2.3 ft and blooms May – Aug.
More about this plant
Dasiphora fruticosa is a species of hardy deciduous flowering shrub in the family Rosaceae, native to the cool temperate and subarctic regions of the northern hemisphere, often growing at high elevations in mountains. Dasiphora fruticosa is still widely referenced in the horticultural literature under its synonym Potentilla fruticosa. Common names include shrubby cinquefoil, golden hardhack, bush cinquefoil, shrubby five-finger, widdy, kuril tea and tundra rose. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 4 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 2.3 ft
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Broadleaf
- Flower colour
- Yellow AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~2 caterpillar species
Dasiphora supports ~2 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is a modest genus.
✦ Bees 168 bee visitors
168 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Shrubby Cinquefoil — the 12 most-recorded:
Wildlife & visitors 3 mammals · 39 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Shrubby Cinquefoil — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 3 mammals species (fruit, seed, browse):
39 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers — the most-recorded:
Across 224 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Shrubby Cinquefoil, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.
Related plants
More Dasiphora →
How we know this (3) Methods & honest limits
We read each species’ measured specific leaf area (leaf area per unit dry weight) from the Global Spectrum dataset and band it: thin & fast (high SLA), medium, or thick & tough (low SLA). The global median is about 10 mm²/mg.
Honest limits: A species-mean from pooled measurements — individual plants vary with light and site. A broad strategy signal, not a precise per-plant figure.
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
McKenzie et al. assigned each species a flower colour with a GPT-4V vision model over iNaturalist photos. We use the confident tier plus a separately-labelled lower-confidence top-up (mostly inconspicuous green/brown flowers), and render it as a small tint — never as an asserted fact, and kept out of the written synopsis.
Honest limits: AI image inference (~87% expert agreement on the confident tier); a decorative, confidence-tiered indicator, not a measured trait.
Sources for this entry (26) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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