Common cinquefoil

Potentilla canadensis, commonly known as dwarf cinquefoil, is a low-growing perennial herb in the Rosaceae family native to eastern North America. The plant produces slender prostrate to ascending stems that root at the nodes, forming loose mats from a short rhizome. Its leaves are palmately compound with five (occasionally three) obovate to oblanceolate leaflets, each toothed in the upper half and silvery-pubescent beneath. Solitary yellow five-petaled flowers about 8 to 12 millimeters across appear in spring from the axils of the lower leaves, producing dry achenes in a head. The species occupies dry open woods, fields, roadsides and sandy waste places from Nova Scotia and Ontario south to Georgia and west to Minnesota and Tennessee. Along with the closely related Potentilla simplex, it is often considered an indicator of poor or impoverished soils, and it serves as host plant for the cinquefoil bud gall wasp Diastrophus potentillae.