SPRING FLOWERS 151 



the Japanese honeysuckle (Lonicera fragrantissima), with 

 the scent of an orange-blossom ; and the Chimonanthus 

 fragrans, also Japanese, with a rich, heavy scent that is 

 all its own. 



These are welcome flowers of spring, but they lack 

 brightness, and spring is full of bright flowers, the 

 brightest of the year, bright in themselves, but most 

 bright and most welcome by coming when they do. 

 Let me name a few of them, confining myself to the 

 earliest flowers of the year. There is the Christmas 

 rose (Helleborus niger), a flower that would attract notice 

 at any time of the year, but most welcome for coming, 

 as it does, in the coldest and darkest days, and now so 

 popular that we have in different parts Christmas-rose 

 farms, from which the fine flowers of the purest white 

 (otherwise unsaleable) are picked by tens of thousands 

 in the fortnights before and after Christmas. But its 

 popularity is no new fashion. It was probably intro- 

 duced into England in the early part of the sixteenth 

 century, and was highly prized. It was excellently 

 described by Parkinson : 



4 The flowers have the most beautiful aspect, and the time 

 of his flowering most rare. ... It hath many fair green leaves 

 rising from the root, each of them standing on a thick round 

 fleshy greene stalke, divided into seven, eight, or nine parts or 

 leaves, and each of them nicked or dented, . . . abiding all 

 the winter, at which time the flowers rise up, . . . every one 



