In its first year heart-leaf is a flat rosette of soft, wrinkled, grey-green leaves, downy on both sides and as long as a hand, lying on the ground. In its second it sends up a single tall spire, waist- to shoulder-high, hung along one side with a row of drooping, finger-long, tubular bells. The bells are purple-pink, sometimes white, and inside each the lower lip is spotted with dark purple rings edged in white, like a trail of small eyes leading in. Bees crawl right inside them. The leaves smell of nothing much and taste bitter at once.

It grows in light, acid, open ground at the edges of the woods: glades, clearings made by a great fall, cut banks and paths in the Elderweald and the Crownboughs, and on burned ground anywhere in the cradle-web. Healers grow it in their gardens, and from there it seeds into hedge-foot and waste ground.

It takes new light ground quickly and gives it up within a few years as other growth closes over it, so it follows clearings around a forest. Seed lies in the soil for years until the ground opens again.

It lives two years, a rosette the first and a flowering spire the second, then dies after shedding a dust of tiny seeds. Some plants linger a third year.

Healers pick the leaves in the second year before the flowers open, dry them in the shade, and give them powdered by weight, a little each day, to the old whose hearts are failing. A healer who uses heart-leaf weighs every dose and writes it down. Healers of Vital Magic hold a heart failing from too much of it through the night with Organ Steady. Its danger is that the line between the healing and the killing dose is narrow and differs between peoples and bodies, so the same leaf that steadies a grown Human can stop a Halfling’s heart. Poisoners know it as well as healers do (see Made Poisons), and a death by it looks like the heart giving out at last.

Elves call the spotted bells the watching flowers and say they mark ground where the forest is keeping count. Basin folk say the spots are the finger-marks of those it killed, and children are told never to put a finger into a bell. Some healers believe the plant gathered by moonlight heals and the plant gathered by day kills, and so gather it at night; the dose decides, not the moon.

Poisoners know it as well as healers do, and the tale of the lord’s heir who died of "a failing heart" at twenty is told wherever heart-leaf grows in a healer’s garden.