Garden lady's-mantle

Alchemilla mollis, the garden lady's-mantle or soft lady's-mantle, is a clump-forming, herbaceous perennial in the family Rosaceae, native to the Carpathian Mountains, the Caucasus and northeastern Turkey and very widely planted as an ornamental in temperate gardens, from which it has naturalised in parts of Europe and North America. It reaches 30 to 50 centimetres in height in flower, forming dense rounded mounds 60 centimetres or more across. The long-petiolate leaves are large, soft and velvety to the touch from a dense covering of fine appressed hairs, kidney-shaped to nearly circular, 5 to 15 centimetres across, palmately divided into nine to eleven shallow rounded lobes with finely serrate margins, pale to mid-green and noted for their habit of holding glistening beads of dew or rainwater in the centre of the leaf. From early summer to autumn it bears very large, frothy, much-branched cymose panicles of tiny apetalous flowers, each only 3 to 4 millimetres across but produced in enormous numbers, the four-lobed yellowish-green calyx giving the whole inflorescence a soft, chartreuse, cloud-like effect.