CXXI.— THE SILVER-WEED. 
Potentilla Anserina Ivinne. 
T hinking only of our British species, we are apt to associate white flowers 
with the Strawberries and yellow ones with the allied genus Potentilla. There 
are, however, yellow-flowered species of Fragaria; whilst a common early-flowering 
representative of the Potentillas is white. This is the little Barren Strawberry 
{Potentilla sterilis Garcke, or more familiarly P. Fragariastrum Ehrhart) which is 
sometimes mistaken for the Strawberry. It is a small plant, grey with silky hairs, 
with trefoil leaves and small flowers on short weak stalks, opening on our hedge- 
banks in April ; whilst the Strawberry is a sturdier, greener plant, bearing its 
larger blossoms a month later on erect stalks from one to six inches high. 
If the colour of the petals is by no means distinctive of all species of Potentilla, 
neither is the form of their leaves, though they were formerly lumped under the 
name Pentaphylloides and its pretty translation Cinquefoil. The genus consists mainly 
of perennial herbaceous plants, though a few species are shrubby. There are, 
perhaps, two hundred species in all, and almost all of them are natives of the North 
Temperate region. They have compound leaves with stipules adnate to the 
leaf-stalk : their conspicuous flowers have an epicalyx and have the parts of the 
perianth in fives or fours : they secrete honey by a ring-shaped nectary inside the 
whorl of numerous stamens ; but they are homogamous, so that self-pollination may 
occur. There are numerous small dry carpels on a dry flattish receptacle, each with 
a lateral or basal style and containing a single ovule. 
The name Potentilla., from the Latin potens, powerful, meaning “ powerful little 
plant,” was applied by Brunfels, Matthiolus, Fuchs, and other botanists of the 
Renaissance, originally apparently to the species which we call Silver-weed, from the 
great medicinal virtues which they attributed to this species and its allies. As a 
matter of fact, beyond a slight astringency they possess no known curative properties. 
Lonicer says : — 
“ By what name the ancients called that which we nowadays call Potentilla does not appear. It is Genserich of the 
Germans, meaning the same as Anserina, because geese rejoice in it for food.’* 
This is the most probable origin of these names and of our own Goose-grass, 
while Goose-tansy contains also a reference to the form of the leaf. Turner, in 1548, 
writes : — 
Portentilla or as some write Potentilla, is named also Tanacetum syluestre. It is named in englishe wylde Tansey, in 
duche Genserich & in french Taunasi Saluage.” 
Ray says truly enough that the plant loves watery places where water has stood 
during the winter ; while Sir James Edward Smith speaks of it as frequent in osier 
holts and spongy meadows. It often seems to rejoice in the dust of the roadside 
gutter ; but Linnaeus considered it indicative of clay. These are places where geese 
