White cinquefoil

Cinquefoil is a small, profusely flowering shrub with leaves densely covered on both sides with silky hairs and snowy-white flowers. It belongs to the Rosaceae family. White cinquefoil is a perennial plant up to 1–1.2 m in height with a thick, long (up to 50 cm) rhizome of dark-brown color, shortened annual and perennial generative and vegetative shoots, and variable leaves. White cinquefoil blooms from June to October. It grows in well-lit places in pine and broadleaf-spruce forests, meadows, grassy slopes, mainly on loamy and fertile sandy-loam soils. Growth rate is medium.

White cinquefoil is distributed in Crimea, Central and Eastern Europe, the central regions of Russia, Belarus, the Ukrainian Polesia, and it is sometimes found in the Donetsk forest-steppe. It contains mineral elements, iodine, carbohydrates, saponins, phenolic carboxylic acids, and tannins. Care for white cinquefoil consists of watering, fertilizing and weeding.

Flowers / fruits: flowers are pure white, up to 2.5 cm in diameter, solitary or gathered in small racemes.

Leaves: leaves consist of five, rarely three to seven, leaflets, first tender green, then green with a silvery tint due to a slight pubescence. Leaflets are lanceolate or lanceolate-ovate, entire-margined, up to 3 cm long and 1.1 cm wide.

Root system: superficial, dense, sensitive to soil compaction.

Lighting requirements: full sun, partial shade.

Winter hardiness: zone 3.

Growing conditions: winter-hardy, undemanding; sensitive to drought and high temperatures; any garden soil; on alkaline soils the leaves turn yellow; sensitive to salinity; every few years pruning to 5–10 cm above ground level is necessary.

Most common species: goose cinquefoil, erect cinquefoil and shrubby cinquefoil.

Shrubby cinquefoil

Shrubby cinquefoil or Kuril tea (Pentaphylloides fruticosa) is a strongly branched, upright, deciduous shrub, from 10 to 150 cm in height. It is a mesophyte, frost-hardy, capable of growing in permafrost conditions. It occurs on meadows, in river floodplains, in forests, along stream beds, on screes, shingle and in tundras. A light-loving plant that prefers moist, well-drained soils. It lives up to 30 years. It blooms from June until the end of the growing season in the mountains of Eastern Siberia. Seeds ripen simultaneously with flowering.

Shrubby cinquefoil has been known in cultivation since 1700. At present there are more than 130 cultivars. It is truly an ornamental plant. Often used in group plantings, rock gardens and borders. Most cultivars have green leaves and flowers in a diverse color palette (yellow, white, orange, pink, red). The plant is actively used in folk, Mongolian and Indo-Tibetan medicine in the form of decoctions and infusions as a sedative, anti-inflammatory and hemostatic agent.