A flat green pancake with black spikes. That is the New Zealand hornwort in plain language. Its body – a flat, lobed, rosette-forming thallus – grows in thin green sheets on damp soil, smooth and shiny with a bluish-green tint. Then come the horns. A plant that looks like it is trying to warn someone. The sporophytes rise from the thallus like thin black spikes, one to three centimetres tall, slender and pointed. They split open from the tip when mature, releasing spores into the air over several weeks. The horns grow continuously from the base – a unique feature among land plants. It looks like a quiet warning, a silent alarm, a signal that something is about to happen. This is one of the few hornworts in New Zealand, and those sporophytes are unmistakable. The thallus is only one cell thick in most places, translucent and delicate, covered in tiny pores called stomata that allow gas exchange. Reproduction happens by spores from the horn-like capsules, or asexually via gemmae – small disc-like propagules that form on the thallus. To find New Zealand hornwort is to spot flat green sheets with black horns rising from damp soil on stream banks, in gardens, on disturbed ground. Green, flat, horned – a quiet warning on the ground. Kneel down. Look closely. The green sheet spreads across the mud. The black spikes rise like tiny sentinels. They are not flowers. They are not leaves. They are something else entirely. The hornwort does not explain itself. It just grows. And the horns keep rising.