Farinopsis salesoviana
Credits
Article from Bean's Trees and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles
Recommended citation
'Farinopsis salesoviana' from the website Trees and Shrubs Online (treesandshrubsonline.
Synonyms
- Comarum salesovianum (Stephan) Ledeb.
- Potentilla salesoviana Stephan
Other taxa in genus
Editorial Note
Treated by Bean under the name Potentilla salesoviana.
A deciduous shrub of lax habit, 3 to 4 ft high, making coarse, erect, reddish growths, but little branched, silky, half covered with the large silvery stipules. Leaves pinnate, 2 to 4 in. long; leaflets five to nine, shortly stalked, oblong, 3⁄4 to 11⁄2 in. long, 1⁄4 to 5⁄8 in. wide, increasing in size towards the end of the leaf, with broad angular teeth, dark green and glabrous above, grey-woolly beneath. Flowers rosy-tinted white, produced in June and July at the summit of a long-stalked corymb 4 to 6 in. high, each of the three to seven flowers 11⁄2 in. across; petals obovate; calyx-lobes lanceolate, and as long as the petals, the five bracts smaller, linear, and about half as long, very downy.
Native of W. Siberia, Central Asia, Mongolia, N.W. China, Tibet, and the Himalaya; introduced in 1823. This species is very distinct from the other shrubby ‘potentillas’ in cultivation in its larger, more numerous, toothed leaflets, and in its coarser growths, which are hollow and die back considerably in winter.
Farinopsis salesoviana was formerly included in Potentilla subgen. Comarum, characterised by a receptacle that becomes spongy in the fruiting stage, instead of remaining dry as is normally the case in Potentilla. Comarum was subsequently raised to genus rank, containing two species – the other is Comarum palustris (syn. Potentilla palustris), the well-known Marsh Cinquefoil – but has since been split into two monospecific genera on the basis of molecular data.
With regard to cultivation, Farrer wrote: ‘… it has been at Ingleborough these ten years, and has there in the fat, comfortable place assigned to it once produced (I think) one flower. But from what Purdom tells me I learn that Potentilla salesoviana requires quite other treatment, and requites it. For it is a plant confined to river shingles and suchlike barren, hungry places: there, as Purdom saw it, the bloom is free, and its effect of remarkable beauty. Let all those, then, who have P. salesoviana immediately learn its true character by putting it on hunger-strike’ (Gard. Chron., Vol. 59 (1916), p. 100). Purdom saw it during his expedition to Kansu with Farrer, when he went off on his own to the Kokonor.