but, when the seed-vessel begins to swell,
“Each roseate feature fades to livid green.”
He adds, in a note, that “The Helleborus niger, or Christmas Rose, has a large beautiful white flower, adorned with a circle of tubular two-lipp’d nectaries. After impregnation the flower undergoes a remarkable change, the nectaries drop off, but the white corol remains, and gradually becomes quite green. This curious metamorphose of the corol, when the nectaries fall off, seems to show that the white juice of the corol were before carried to the nectaries for the purpose of producing honey, because, when these nectaries fall off, no more of the white juice is secreted in the corol, but it becomes green, and degenerates into a calyx.”
Dr. Darwin’s theory may or may not be strictly accurate, but his observation of facts is certainly undoubted.
In one of Keats’s early poems he notices the Hellebore’s curving leaf,
“As the leaves of Hellebore
Turn to whence they sprung before,
And beneath each ample curl
Peeps the richness of a pearl!”
But if poets know how to describe a Christmas Rose, there are others who do not. A horticultural book just published, says—and the description is a curiosity—that in the month of January, “in our garden, on the hillside, the Christmas Rose is the sweetest and prettiest thing to show. Its petals are weak and pale; its perfume is very faint; if you gather it, the leaves presently fall off, and the flower is destroyed. Leave it in the hedge, when it is almost the only thing to gladden the eye:
“The Christmas Rose, the last flower of the year,
Comes when the holly berries glow and cheer—
When the pale snowdrops rise from the earth,
So white and spirit-like ’mid Christmas mirth.”
I wish the writer would show me this curious Christmas Rose, which grows in a hedge, and has weak petals and a faint perfume, and is spirit-like! What can it be? and who could have written these very unmelodious lines?