HELLEBORUS. 
or more. H. pauciflorum isin the same line, and both are to be got in 
the Southern Alps of New Zealand. 
H. Leontopodium is that notably beautiful New Zealand alpine 
which utterly wipes the Flannel-flower out of reckoning, so much 
whiter is it, and so much wider, woollier, and more silvery the heads 
of Edelweiss that it carries on the same stems (but clad in oblong over- 
lapping leaves), and from much the same tufts as its crushed rival 
or feeble imitator or dethroned original. It has also been known as 
Gnaphalium Colensoi, and is desperately to be desired. 
H. niveum hugs the hot rocks of the Pamphylian Taurus, whence 
it sends up stems of a foot or 18 inches, carrying flowers whose blossom- 
bracts are of an especially firm and gleaming opacity of solid silver- 
white, though its height is a trifle excessive for our needs. 
H. virgineum is yet more lovely. For it is a very neat close tuft of 
snowy wool in the sheer summit-walls of Athos, making quite a woody 
trunk to bear its packed masses of whiteness, from which emerge 
stems of 2 or 3 inches, each, as a rule, carrying but one large and pure 
star-head, with its gleaming glossy bracts of silver broad and spread- 
ing. They call it Amarantos there, the “everlasting ’—by so cruel 
a fate has so beautiful a name (for a thing so beautiful) become trans- 
ferred to the ugliest colour in the garden. There is a kindred species 
to this, H. amorginum, rather larger in the habit, with stems of half 
a foot and more, and rather smaller in the flower, from the rocks and 
barren places of Amorgos. 
Heliosperma, a sub-division of Silene, q.v. 
Helléborus.—In ample room and in deep rich soil at the foot of 
the rock-garden, or in broad sunny (or cool) slopes together with Col- 
chicums, all the Christmas Roses and Lent Roses are in place, ample 
in their splendid foliage, and in their blossom either weird and sump- 
tuous, or pure with a dazzling chastity that seems inappropriate and 
hypocritical in plants so poisonous and sophisticated. Yet Helleborus 
niger is one of the candours of the world, in all its forms of a white 
and unchallengeable flawlessness. Many forms it has indeed, and one 
day in winter or earliest spring in the sub-alpine woods of Garda or 
Como—even within a quarter of an hour of Menaggio and all its hotels 
and old maids—will yield you half a dozen extra-special Christmas 
Roses pre-eminent in size or precocity, or lateness, or whiteness, or 
breadth of petal—all being true prizes each in its own way, advanc- 
ing the hour of the bloom or protracting it. So now we have a period 
from Qctober to the end of April that is never without H. niger, so 
called because its heart, or root, is black, while its face shines with a 
blazing white innocence unknown among the truly pure of heart. 
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