Like the true Strawberry, this Barren-Strawberry is in the Rose Family. It has small compound leaves with 3 leaflets. The yellow flowers are borne above the foliage from April to June. It is a very nice groundcover that spreads by the short rhizomes and surface stolons. Its native range is from Minnesota to western Quebec down into Indiana and Pennsylvania and down the Appalachians into North Carolina. I see it only occasionally in some gardens of knowledgeable gardeners and in professional landscapes. Some are sold in pots at a good number of conventional nurseries and in some native plant nurseries. It is a very nice low perennial groundcover that should be used more. I was not aware until now that the generic name was changed from Waldsteinia, (named after Count Franz Adam Waldstein-Wartenburg, an Austrian botanist) to a Geum, which is a very similar kind of plant. As a lumper in botany, it seems good to me, though I am an old horticulturist with older horticulture books.

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Native to North America. Very similar to Geum ternatum, the species from Asia and Europe. Not sure what the differences are.

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