Gleaming lady's mantle

Alchemilla micans, the gleaming lady's-mantle, is a low, tufted, herbaceous perennial in the family Rosaceae and one of the many apomictic microspecies of the Alchemilla vulgaris aggregate, native to Europe, where it grows in damp meadows, grassy slopes and open woodland on well-drained, moderately rich soils. It forms compact basal rosettes 15 to 40 centimetres tall in flower, with long-petiolate, reniform to almost circular leaves 4 to 8 centimetres wide, palmately divided into seven to nine shallow lobes, each lobe finely and sharply serrate; the bright green blades are conspicuously silky-hairy beneath and along the petioles and slightly so above, the hairs giving the plant a satiny shimmer in oblique light, hence the epithet micans. Water beading on the leaves at dawn was a celebrated feature of lady's-mantles to medieval alchemists. The slender, ascending flowering stems bear loose terminal cymes of tiny, apetalous, four-sepaled yellow-green flowers about 3 millimetres across in early to mid-summer, succeeded by small achene-like fruits enclosed in the persistent hypanthium.