Alpine Cinquefoil
Potentilla crantzii, a deep dive
For your convenience, an index of this deep dive series, and also an index of my silverweed content.
I’ve recently felt somewhat overwhelmed with trying to run this intergeneric hybridisation project between Argentina anserina (Silverweed) and other Potentilla species, so I will probably step back from that and allow the land race amongst the Silverweed from different countries to work themselves out. Someone reached out to me with possible samples from Iceland, which would be amazing if it works out.
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Welcome to the second edition of the our deep dive series, where we dive deeply into a specific member of the Potentilleae tribe and have some fun hypothesizing about the hybrid offspring with Argentina anserina.
In the first post, I talked about Nepal Cinquefoil in great tangential depth and I’ll do so again in this edition. My reasoning is that you can learn about the basics of endemic habitats, ecology and botany easily from keyword searches online, but the fun and interest will be from things like etymology and history.
In this edition of deep dive, we will talk about Potentilla crantzii, which has the austere name of Alpine Cinquefoil. Like many of the Cinquefoils (Potentilla sp.) its leaves are divided into five leaflets, and its yellow flowers also have five petals. There is an excellent fact sheet by the Botanical Society of Britain & Ireland which summarises the species well.
I chose to cover this species because it has the genetic adaptability to survive in frigid places like Greenland and Northern Canada, but also in mild and wet climates like the UK. They’re more likely to thrive in higher altitudes, hence the common name, but are capable of surviving at sea level (if they seeds I germinated are anything to go by).
Alpine Cinquefoil and Common Silverweed are really quite different though. The base stems of the plant are woody, and Alpine Cinquefoil does not send out stems that root (so no vegetative spreading). It appears that they rely on seeds to further their genetic line, which are produced asexually (in most cases).
Digging into the name
One of the first things I want to know when I come across a plant that has been named after a person is why. In the case of the Nepal Cinquefoil, the popular cultivar “Miss Willmott” was most likely named by a fan of the famous Ellen Willmott. For P. crantzii, the crantzii refers to a certain botanist called Heinrich Johann Nepomuk von Crantz. He’s more accomplished than Miss Willmott, being learned in botany and medicine, but certainly less well known. So who was the key person who decided to name this plant after Dr. Crantz, and why did he do so?
I’ve found that when I start digging into the origins of Latin names, things quickly become obscure. Someone, somewhere probably admired Dr. Crantz and wanted to name something after him, but is that really all there is? Things tend to get cloudier because Latin names generally change hands several times before settling on the present day. P. crantzii was first described as Fragaria crantzii (in 1766), before going through 212(!) intermediary synonyms. I’m not crazy enough (yet) to create a timeline of these synonyms but it’s funny how this plant has cycled through so many names before landing back with Dr. Crantz, albeit in a different genus - probably rightfully deserved. I’ll note that the official Kew Gardens page has what I think is wrong initial publication of P. crantzii, attributing it instead to an Austria-Hungarian paper more than 100 years after the first description.
The name Fragaria crantzii tells us that the botanists of the 1700s thought that Alpine Cinquefoil was in the strawberry family. In fact, a great many of the Potentilleae tribe have chopped and changed from Fragaria in times gone by. This includes, of course, my favourite Silverweed, Argentina anserina which once graced the Fragaria genus as Fragaria anserina. If you’re wondering how plant species and genus were classified before the advent of genomic sequencing, you can get a clue from how often these plants changed their genus in days gone by. Botanists looked for similarities in form, such as leaf or flower, and this qualitative classification is very subjective. Having said that, Potentilla and Fragaria are similar enough that there has been some success in creating intergeneric hybrids. Remember, though, what really counts as a species anyway? There are at least 26(!) ways of categorising species. This is not just an academic question, conservationists have a heck of a time figuring out what to preserve. Are the few critically endangered plants that represent a species really just a cultivar?
Back to the task at hand, I located the scans of the first published document (in Latin) that refers to Fragaria crantzii.
I tried google translate on this piece of Latin and after some fiddling around with ‘f’ and ‘s’ looking very similar, and a learned friend (thanks!), I produced this translation
FRAGARIA crantzii.
Strawberry with leaves originating at the base, with five lobes, obtuse and borne high; with subopposite flowers divided in three parts and stained petals. CRANTZ. Austriacarum Stirpium II. T1. F2
Austriacarum Stripium refers to a book written by Dr. Crantz again, and published 3 years after this passage (so one must assume that he was writing both at the same time and there was some delay in publication of the later book). My Latin-learned friend informs me that Quinquefolium minus repens aureum is really just another synonym, and the scan of this later book indeed points to a certain person called Scheuchz. I think this person is the Swiss Johann Jakob Scheuchzer whose lifespan at least overlapped with Dr. Crantz. Mr. Scheuchzer wrote several works about his travels throughout Switzerland. The Wikipedia entry records that he wrote four books about this, but our reference points to a mystery fifth book. After looking around in Google Books, I unearthed this missing book (written in 1723) which has a detailed Latin description of the Alpine Cinquefoil, before the Latin binomial scheme had arrived in the mid 1700s. If you thought the Latin binomial nomenclature was bad, then checkout Pentaphyllo minore molti lanugine pubescente flore luteo, another synonym for Quinquefolium minus repens aureum, which in modern day is Potentilla crantzii!
Origin of the Name
Okay, so I think we are getting to the truth of the matter now. Here’s my hypothesis about how the plant Potentilla crantzii was named so:
Alpine Cinquefoil was first described before the Latin binomial nomenclature was created by Linnaeus. Johann Jakob Scheuchzer was not the first person to describe this plant, that honour goes to some mysterious people who I know only through the initials C. B. and J. B. and also an enigmatic book I know only as Clus. Pan. When Dr. Heinrich Johann Nepomuk von Crantz came along and wrote a book that referred to the Alpine Cinquefoil, he took the chance to name it after himself (Fragaria crantzii) whilst referring to Mr. Scheuchzer’s work.
For health, stomach and food forests
Apart from my peculiar glut for etymological archaeology, I like to look for edibility of any plant I encounter. It’s in keeping with my focus on food forests in general, but maybe I’m also just greedy. In more recent times, I’ve been expanding this interest into an ethnobotanical angle, where plants are studied from their use from cultures all around the world.
My searches have really thrown up just one hit for human consumption of Alpine Cinquefoil. It is used with 73 other plants in rural village in Turkey called Zorlu, in the Artvin-Borçka region:
Gynecological treatment method, which is used for pregnancy, was explained by Pakize Altuntaş (author's grandmother). Her mother (1940-1965 years) and her grandmother (1900-1930 years) […] used this method for generations. But the last one to implement this method is her. She is explained that [she] “Collected the 74 plant taxa [and] boiled [them] in a barrel. The water must be lukewarm. The same water is used the next three days morning and the water is [first heated]. [The] Patient should stay in the water for at least 1 hour”. [This method was used] between 1978-1992[..]. As a result of this method, 10 patients had been cured and this method resulted pregnancy for them
That same paper pointed me at the antimicrobial properties of Potentilla in general - in this case, against Streptococcus oralis (a bacteria that appears naturally in the mouth).
I started searching for older synonyms, for example, Potentilla gelida, but that was to be slim pickings too. One paper I found interesting featured Uzbekistan, where it it is noted that cattle and goats like to forage Alpine Cinquefoil leaves in the spring and summer, but camels are not such a fan. I daresay a herbal tea can be made from the leaves to good effect, and cautious trials of the leaves in salad and cooked recipes is worth investigating. From another angle, Alpine Cinquefoil could be a good candidate for forage at high altitude, cold climate regenerative farming contexts, where animals are integrated into a food forest situation.
In my online travels, I turfed up a paper that talks about the effects of ingesting Potentilla crantzii (amongst other species) on the human colon. According to this paper, it probably will be beneficial to prevent colon specific diseases and healing colon disorders.
I would place a bet on Potentilla being generally good for gut health from all the research papers I’ve read whilst searching for “potentilla <species> food”. Have a look at the hits on “potentilla colon” on Google Scholar if you’re interested.
In a wider context, several researchers have a pretty comprehensive overview of all research performed on Potentilla species from 2009 to 2022 from the viewpoint of “biological updates, recent advances in phytochemical and pharmacological research, and toxicological reports”. The lead author of this paper is a certain Professor Michał Tomczyk who seems to have a keen research interest in Potentilla - it’s nice to see the passion in others - to him, I am just a humble acolyte!
Wrapping Up
So what have we learned in this whole bunch of exposition?
People probably will name things after themselves if they’re given half a chance, but at least in this instance credit was given to the previous name!
The main features we would gain from hybridisation with Argentina anserina are the high altitude adaptations, but there are some pretty serious drawbacks as P. crantzii does not propagate itself with stems. Cold climate adaptations I think can be found from specific varieties of P. anserina that grow in places like Iceland.
In terms of health and diet, it seems like Potentilla leaf herbal tea would be advisable as part of a healthy diet. What screams out to me is the need for more research into the whole genus (and of course the Argentina genus) in general.
I’ll finish with my new favourite quote about Potentilla in general
Despite the great medical potential of Potentilla preparations, clinical studies are very limited. […] These efforts will provide essential data on the clinical use of Potentilla preparations and will help to develop new, cheap and safe plant-based drugs, which are urgently needed, especially in the least developed countries. In addition, new plant-based medicines will also be greatly acknowledged by all patients who prefer alternative medicines.
Now if only this paper wasn’t behind a paywall…