The umbrella liverwort looks like it belongs on another planet. Its body – a flat, fleshy, lobed thallus – sprawls in mats across damp soil, the surface marked with diamond-shaped patterns like reptilian scales. Bright green to yellowish-green, it catches the eye not for size but for sheer strangeness. But the real theatre happens in breeding season. Male structures rise as flat-topped discs on stalks, while the female ones – archegoniophores – unfurl like tiny green parasols with finger-like lobes dangling beneath. They resemble something from a low-budget science fiction film, or a bad idea blooming in slow motion. What makes this species special is precisely those umbrellas. No other liverwort in New Zealand puts on quite this show. The male saucers and the fringed female parasols appear most visibly in spring and early summer, when reproduction is in full swing. Designed by a committee of aliens, you might say. Look closer at the thallus. The diamond-shaped air chambers form a distinctive pattern across the surface. Underneath, purple scales and rhizoids anchor the plant to the soil. Reproduction happens two ways: sexually via those umbrella structures, or asexually through gemmae – tiny disc-like propagules that form in cup-shaped depressions. To find umbrella liverwort is to spot flat, reptilian mats on damp ground, green and scaly and utterly alien. And when they are breeding, the umbrellas appear – tiny green parasols that seem like a warning or a joke. It remains the liverwort of strange shapes, the one that belongs on another planet.