Eged's Silverweed
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| Eged's Silverweed | ||||||||||||||||
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| Argentina egedii (Wormsk.) Rydb. |
Eged's Silverweed is a flowering perennial plant in the rose family Rosaceae. It is a salt-tolerant plant native to arctic and cool temperate coasts of the Northern Hemisphere, most commonly growing in saltmarshes. The southern limits of the range are California and Long Island, New York in North America, and the Baltic Sea and coastal eastern Siberia in Eurasia. It is also sometimes called Pacific Silverweed, though this does not describe its range well.
It was formerly classified in the genus Potentilla but has recently been reclassified into the new genus Argentina. It is very closely related to Silverweed (A. anserina, the only other species in the genus), and is treated as a subspecies of it by some botanists.
Eged's Silverweed is a low-growing herbaceous plant with creeping red stolons up to 80 cm long. The leaves are 10-40 cm long, evenly pinnate into in crenate leaflets 3-5 cm long and 2 cm broad, thinly covered with a few silky white hairs. The sparsity of the hairs is a useful distinction from A. anserina, which is more densely hairy.
The flowers are produced singly on 5-15 cm long stems, 2-3.5 cm diameter with five yellow petals. The fruit is a cluster of dry achenes.
