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Lunularia cruciata
Lunularia cruciata is a small, flat, green liverwort (not a true flowering plant) that forms mats on moist soil, pots and greenhouse benches. It is grown or tolerated mainly as a weed, and it thrives in cool, damp, shaded conditions.
Lunularia is a genus of liverworts whose only species is Lunularia cruciata, the crescent-cup liverwort. Lunularia is either the only genus in the order Lunulariales, or may be placed in the order Marchantiales. The name, from Latin luna, moon, refers to the moon-shaped gemma cups.
Lunularia cruciata is distributed across the world, found in continents including Europe, Australasia, Asia, the Americas, and Africa. It occurs commonly in western Europe, and is native to the Mediterranean region, where the morphological forms from sexual reproduction are more frequently found there. It is also common in California, where it now grows "wild", and is known as an introduced weed in gardens and greenhouses in Australia. Ella Orr Campbell believed that L. cruciata was introduced into New Zealand sometime after 1867. The sporophytes of L. cruciata are rare, but has been found in European regions, as well as in South Africa, Argentina, California, India, Japan and New Zealand.
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Lunularia by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
