Hepatica nobilis
A small blue-violet flower that ushers in spring in broadleaf woods, even before the trees leaf out. Its three-lobed leaves, shaped like a liver, gave it its name. It likes the limestone soils of the hills and the lower mountains.
At the end of March, on a limestone slope, the beech wood is still bare. Between the roots, dozens of blue corollas have pushed through the leaf litter, beside old dark leaves that have lasted through the winter. Should a shower come, the flowers close up again.
This member of the buttercup family measures 5 to 15 cm, according to Flora Helvetica, as cited by Info Flora. Its flower has five to ten tepals of a blue verging on violet, and only exceptionally pink or white ones; three hairy bracts, pressed just beneath, imitate a calyx. The leaves grow at ground level, on a long hairy stalk. Somewhat leathery, divided into three equal lobes and often violet underneath, they usually last through the winter. People thought they saw a liver in them, hence the plant’s name; in the Middle Ages it was used, without much success, against ailments of that organ, the Botanical Garden of Bern notes.
Info Flora reports it throughout Switzerland, in woods and on scrubby slopes, from the colline to the montane zone, rarely higher. It tolerates shade and prefers limestone. The Botanical Garden of Bern describes it in open beech and oak woods with a stony subsoil. According to the University of Zurich’s garden, it seeks out old woods whose soil is neither dug over nor compacted; a single plant can then live there for 70 to 80 years.
According to Flora Helvetica, it flowers from March to May, sometimes as early as January. Each plant stays in bloom for about a week; the new leaves come afterwards. With no nectar to give, the flowers offer their pollen to bees and beetles; their pigment, an anthocyanin, turns light into heat and protects them from frost, the Bern garden explains. They close in the evening and in the rain, and grow a little each time they reopen, the Zurich garden notes. Its hairy achenes bear an appendage rich in fats. Ants carry them off to their nest, eat this store and discard the seed intact: in this way the liverleaf spreads little by little.
Not threatened across the country as a whole, it is near threatened on the Swiss Plateau according to the 2019 Red List. The Confederation does not protect it; seven cantons do, fully in Aargau, Basel-Landschaft and Solothurn, partially in Basel-Stadt, Bern, Jura and Zurich.
Sources: Info Flora, species account (after Flora Helvetica); Botanical Garden of the University of Bern, plant of the month, April 2013; Botanical Garden of the University of Zurich, garden newsletter, January 2023.
