'Miss Wilmott'
Nepalese Cinquefoil; aka,
Five-Finger Potentilla
"I wish I knew the woods like you do. Say, what's the name of that little red flower?"
Rubbing his back, Joe regarded the flower resentfully "Well, some folks call it one thing & some calls it another. I always just call it Pink Flower."
"Babbitt" by Lewis Sinclair
(1885-1951)
There's a charming & somewhat eccentric nursery near us that keeps unpredictable hours, as the woman who owns it is a bit of an "old time hippy" with a laid back attitude about life taking precedence over labor. She sells wonderful "garden junk" such as salvaged iron off vintage machinery, never at all expensive.
She's very lax about labeling things, especially rapidly growing or self-seeding plants such as she pots up herself to sell. She usually has a good memory for what's in every pot. However, in 2002 we bought something from her she struggled to recall what it was, & slowly lit upon "some kind of ornamental strawberry."
We brought a pot of it home & planted it at the edge of a patch of 'Pink Panda' ornamental strawberry. I did immediately wonder why the leaf arrangement was in sets of five like cinquefoil whereas the 'Pink Panda' was in sets of three. I even looked it up & thought the leaf looked like Potenilla nepalensis, except that throughout that first year in the garden, our little start remained a very flat-to-the-ground strawberry-like clump for which I had to keep the 'Pink Panda' from overwhelming it. Since Nepalese Potentilla flowers profusely on upright branches, & our small perennial bloomed only a little without any height at all, I just decided the seller probably knew what she had sold, & the reason it looked like a potentilla was because ornamental strawberries are in fact hybridized with potentillas.
Although during that first spring, summer, & autumn it remained a very prostrate clump that did not spread much, in retrospect I realize it was just busy putting down its roots. Beginning the following spring, it began to reach outward & upward, until it was a substantial subshrub, & not the strawberry-like creeper it had seemed likely to be for its first year.That second spring it really took off. That one little clump reached its slender limb structure three feet in all directions for a six-foot spread all told. It flowered moderately in spring, then in summer it was just loaded with bright red & pink blossoms. The flowering panicals stood upward to twenty inches of height.
Now there was no room left to believe the seller knew what she had sold. This was most obviously P. nepalensis. The most often offered deep rose cultivars are 'Miss Willott' (or 'Wilmottiae') & 'Ron McBeth,' both of which are somewhat more compact & a little shorter than ours. Ours had gotten so large it seemed obviously a wilder strain. It is most likely a seedling from 'Miss Wilmott' that reverted to more a wild state.
'Miss Wilmott' is named for the English gardening fanatic Ellen Ann Wilmott (1860-1934). She was the wealthy patron of Alfred Parson, whom she commissioned to provide botanical paintings of the specimens in her rose garden. These watercolors illustrated her two-volume overview of The Genus Rosa (1910, 1914), which on the open market is today worth about $2,000 to $4,000, or even more. After Ellen's death, the Alfred Parson paintings went into Lindley Library at the Royal Horticultural Society in London. In 1987 with the support of the RHS, a splendidly reproduced volume of all these watercolors was issued as A Garden of Roses.
At the height of her enterprises she had from eighty to over a hundred full-time gardeners who shipped seeds all around the world for other gardeners. Besides her main gardens at Warley Place in Essex, she had additional gardens in France & Italy, & especially throughout Essex, many a garden to this day owes a debt to the hundreds of strains developed at Warley. A book issued in 1909, Warley Garden in Spring & Summer, includes thirty photogravure plates that reveal the exellence of Ellen's gardens in their heyday before the first world war, after which the loss of her wealth resulted in the gardens' decline.
By the time of her death in 1934 she lived in but three rooms of her largely boarded-up & mouldering manse, & her gardens were left to become their own wilderness. In 1978, the remnant of her gardens, known today as the Warley Place Wild Garden, became part of the Essex Naturalists Trust.
Two surviving gardens today on the English Heritage Register have her hand in their design. One is Spetchly Park Gardens in Worscestershire which she orchestrated with her sister Rose who married into the estate, the other is Lotherton Hall Gardens in West Yorkshire.
Nepalese Cinquefoil is but one of the many plants named for her, either species names or cultivar names. This perennial is a wee bit sensitive its first year in the ground, byt is thereafter hardy & drought-tolerant. It is very free-blooming once established; it can easily flower continuously from June to September, at the minimum. If it does stop blooming toward the end of summer, a good sheering will induce it to send up more upright stems, & flower again for autumn. Season-end sheering also keeps it from becoming increasingly sprawly & leggy.
Hardy to the point of weediness in zones 7-8, it can succeed with varying degrees of tenderness in zones five through ten, though bloom time will be briefer in colder zones. It requires organically rich extremely well-draining soil, & does not thrive in wet or clayey soils. It prefers full sun but may require a tiny portion of shade in hotter zones.
The genus name means "Potent" or "Powerful," because it has been believed to be a potent medicinal plant. Nepalese potentillia is used in the Western Himalayas, from Nepal to Pakistan, to treat burns, & for other uses, though efficacy is todate unproven. The starchy root is also regarded as edible, in a pinch.