Alchemilla mollis

Garden lady’s mantle is native to the great mountain ranges of south-east Europe and South-West Asia: the Carpathian Mountains in Romania, the Balkan Mountains in central Bulgaria, northern Greece, northern Anatolia, the Caucasus and the Elburz Mountains in northern Iran. Their growth altitude has been reported as 900-2,100 m and favoured sites include mountain meadows in particular, and areas alongside riversides in beech and fir forests.

The bold and beautiful, easy to maintain and hardy garden lady’s mantle has become a highly popular ornamental, particularly in Central, Western and Northern Europe. With varying degrees of delay, the species has moved beyond the locations where it was planted and now grows widely in the wild, especially in the northern parts of Ireland, England, Scotland, Holland, Germany and Denmark. Many well-established occurrences of escapees have been observed even further to the east, all the way to western Ukraine and, in particular, further north in the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Norway and southern Sweden.

Garden lady’s mantle was probably intentionally sown or planted in France in the Savoy Alps, from where the earliest record is a sample from 1935. In Norway, the species began to escape into the wild as early as the late 1930s, in the British Isles a decade later, and in Germany in the 1950s. In Sweden, the earliest observations of the plant in the wild date back to the late 1960s, in Iceland to 1965, in the Netherlands to the late 1970s and in Belgium as late as the 1990s. The species appeared in the wild in the Faroe Islands at the end of the 1990s, but did not begin to spread visibly until a decade later. In North America, garden lady’s mantle is cultivated all the way up to Alaska in the north. The species has a fair inclination to run wild, which has become evident in places across the pond. In Alaska, the species’ rating for escaping is 56 on a range of zero to one hundred.

In Finland, garden lady’s mantle did not become common in gardens until very late in the 1900s, particularly in public mass and fringe beds. Hence, the escape of the species is in its early stages: in 2014, feral sightings were reported on a dozen sites and the species was observed rooted in landfills and compost areas in many places all the way up to Rovaniemi in the north. In reality, escapees are probably much more common than this suggests.