Round-lobed Hepatica (Hepatica americana) is one of the first native plants of North America to flower along the GAP. It may appear before the Spring Equinox in March and sometimes while there is still snow on the ground. Unlike Coltsfoot, however, it is unlikely to be seen along the verges of the GAP itself. It occurs in shaded hardwood forests; its presence is a good indicator of a mature, undisturbed woodland environment. The genus name Hepatica derives from hepar, the Greek word for “liver” and later adopted into Latin—a reference to its three-lobed, leathery leaves, which were thought to resemble the lobes of a human liver. Although Hepatica appears at the same time as several Spring Ephemerals, it is not an ephemeral itself. Its leathery, three-lobed leaves do not disappear with the closing of the forest canopy in late May but persist through the summer and may even be visible throughout the winter.
Hepatica’s reputation as a medicinal herb is a classic case of the Doctrine of Signatures—the old belief that a plant’s form reveals what part of the body it can heal. Because the leaf has three lobes reminiscent of the liver’s lobes, European herbalists from at least the 17th century prescribed a European species of Hepatica—Hepatica nobilis—for various ailments of the liver. It appears as Noble Liverwort in the 1633 edition of Englishman John Gerard’s The Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes, revised and enlarged by the apothecary Thomas Johnson, where it is recommended as “good against weakness of the liver.”
The tradition was carried on in America, where the dried leaves of Hepatica became a staple ingredient in 19th-century liver and kidney tonics. In 1883 alone, more than 200 tons of wild hepatica leaves were harvested in eastern North America to supply a booming trade in patent “liver tonics.” The craze died down when it appeared that the remedy caused rather than cured cases of jaundice. The Doctrine of Signatures, which led to Hepatica’s use as a medicinal plant in the first place, has long since fallen out of favor.
Native Americans, including the Chippewa and the Cherokee, also recognized Hepatica as a treatment for liver ailments, however, while the Iroquois and the Menominee turned to it for gynecological complaints. Iroquois women who had their sights set on a man chewed the plant to bewitch him and, as the ethnobotanical record puts it, to “make them [men] crazy by affecting their hearts”—a use explicitly catalogued as “witchcraft medicine.”
Hepatica is seldom used in contemporary herbal practice. Evidence of therapeutic benefit is inadequate, while fresh plant material contains protoanemonin, which may cause skin and mucosal irritation, and the plant is considered mildly toxic if ingested. Hepatica should be regarded chiefly as an attractive wildflower and a faithful harbinger of Spring along the GAP, not a foraging or self-treatment herb.
Note that a very similar plant, Sharp-lobed Hepatica (Hepatica acutiloba), also occurs along the GAP. Taxonomists have long argued over whether Sharp-lobed Hepatica and Round-lobed Hepatica are separate species or varieties of one species, and molecular work has led some authorities to place both in the genus Anemone (as Anemone acutiloba and Anemone americana). These distinctions are of interest to hard-core botanists but need not concern the average GAPer.
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