Hepatica leaves, Wyassup

Hepatica is not a particularly rare wildflower, but for reasons that have as much to do with older age and less-than-reliable memory as with general busy-ness, the patch of "liverworts"—another common name that refers to the fancied resemblance of the leaves to the shape and color of liver—I'd discovered more than two decades ago had remained stubbornly unfindable. And since that was the only patch I'd ever found, Anemone americana—the genus name keeps shifting—was, for me, the rarest of the rare. But the write-up of a recent public plant walk offered a tantalizing clue about where the Hepatica might be found, so off I went. While I found lots of photogenic wildflowers in a stretch of woods where the underlying quartzite rock had sweetened the soil, the area didn't match my recollections, and I was just about to give up when I spotted a familiar group of leaves and hair-against-the-cold stems. Hepatica actually lives! Now, if I can only keep this spot in my memory bank long enough to re-find it next April when the plant blooms...