Showing posts with label Norwegian cinquefoil. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Norwegian cinquefoil. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Potentilla norvegica (Norwegian cinquefoil)

Today's weed is Norwegian cinquefoil (Potentilla norvegica).



There are several of these weeds in the woods behind our house. I let them grow basically because I didn't know what they were. Most of the compound leaves have five lobes, but other than that, they look a lot like strawberry leaves, which are everywhere in our yard. Actually "ubiquitous" would be a more appropriate word than "everywhere", but "ubiquitous" has become -- well, it seems to be showing up everywhere lately.


A note about the pronunciation of cinquefoil:
I guess because the last language I learned was Italian (40 years ago), I was pronouncing the common name something like "chink-wuh-foil", until I finally looked it up and saw that it is normally pronounced more in a more Spanish way, "sink-foil" or in the more French way, "sank-foil".