14 IN A GLOUCESTERSHIRE GARDEN 



or three plants, though it has been grown as a garden 



plant certainly from the beginning of the sixteenth 



century. Prior to that I can find few records of it, 



but when we come to the great gardening books of 



the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the beautiful 



^vinter flower gets its full meed of praise, and from 



that time it was never lost to English gardens ; but I 



do not know of any writer, other than the A\Titers 



of botanical books, who speaks of it, except Erasmus 



Darwin (and he, of course, may be ranked among the 



botanical Avriters), and what he says may be worth 



quoting, not only because I suppose very few now 



read The Loves of the Plants, but also for the curious 



note on the plant : — 



' Bright as the silvery plume, or pearly shell, 

 The snow-white rose or lily's virgin bell, 

 The fair helleborus attractive shone, 

 Warmed every sage and every shepherd won.' 



And the note is this : 



' The Helleborus niger has a large, beautiful, white flower 

 adorned with a circle of tubular two-lipped nectaries. After 

 impregnation the flower undergoes a remarkable change ; the 

 nectaries drop off, but the white coral remains and gradually 

 becomes quite green, and degenerates into a calyx.' — Loves of 

 the Plants, ii. 198-202. 



Accurate observer as he was, it never seems to have 

 occurred to him that the ' large, beautiful, white ' 



