HELLEBORUS. 
Catalogues offer many forms, and all are most lovely, while the best 
of acknowledged ones is H. maximus (or altifolius) ; but the woods of 
Italy are full of its peers and masters, and imported plants will in due 
course yield a harvest of wonder. “In due course,” because it is of 
no avail to put in Hellebores one day and expect them to have filled 
the garden with their silver glare ina week. They take time, and even 
a long time, to get established ; collected crowns must have two years 
to show much leafage, and three, probably, before they really flower 
in character, but after that will grow increasingly glorious every year, 
and should never again be moved or touched, as they passionately 
resent disturbance and division. Nor should they ever be allowed to 
starve, but their soil must perennially be enriched with abundance of 
every coarse fatness, for their greedy appetites are of the grossest, 
and, like Mrs. Norris, nobody more hates pitiful doings. Their finest 
association is in clusters and drifts over a broad bank in the sun, with 
Cyclamen and Colchicums to accompany them in autumn, smaller 
ferns and lilies for the summer, and for spring common bluebells, 
Hepaticas, and Wood-anemones. 
The other Hellebores are more frank in revelation of their inner 
natures, and all their flowers, livid, speckled, or bronzed, are eloquent 
warnings of an evil principle. Most splendid is H. orientalis, with 
flowers of pinkish white, several to the taller stem, and leaves downy 
beneath ; there are countless garden hybrids between this, H. lividus, 
H. colchicus, &c. This last has solitary flowers of deep purple, with 
broad oval sepals and a solitary basal leaf to each stem; H. gutiatus 
has stems of some 18 inches to 2 feet high, carrying a loose group of 
blooms on branching sprays, each star being nearly 3 inches across 
and of clear white, heavily freckled with purple. Very large flowers 
are produced, before any leaf appears, by the pearl-pale and pinkish- 
flushed H. antiquorum, which has broad-pointed sepals, and two basal 
leaves ultimately to each stem; H. hybridus is the vast name of the 
garden-bred races, which, like the last (and indeed all the taller and 
branched Hellebores), come into blossom about March and April, and 
are fertile of the most sumptuous and beautiful colours in glowing 
claret-reds, sombre metallic purples, and so forth—all the best to be 
found described in such catalogues as offer them; H. giganteus, H. 
purpurascens, and H. atrorubens have flowers in shades of deep rose 
or claret, very handsome ; H. guitatus is a rarity, with blossoms of 
yellowish white; and one of the strangest and rarest of all is H. torquatus, 
not a large grower, with noble flowers of a bloomy powdered-looking 
steely slate-blue. Of the green-blossomed species, none have so much 
importance, though H. odoratus has the charm of its sweetness, and 
412 
