400 THE ROLL OF THE SEASONS 



inner face is a green that seems trying to become 

 white. The Caucasian hellebore is almost as white 

 as the big Christmas-rose, but wears its flowers two 

 or three on a common stalk. In shape they resemble 

 the Marechal Niel rather than the Gloire de Dijon. 

 Another from nearer home is orientals, which grows 

 in Greece, and reminds us a little more closely of our 

 own setter-wort, now blossoming in the wood. None 

 is prettier than that same setter-wort, and none re- 

 sembles it in its almost armful of winter growth of 

 blossom-like green, whence the perfectly proportioned 

 and daintily, coloured flowers open smilingly to 

 the keenest winds. 



The long border of Christmas-roses is further 

 whitened just now with snowdrops and snowflakes, 

 of which L. hernandesii is the earliest. And it is 

 splashed with the warmer yellow of aconite and the 

 purple of colchicum, with more orthodox crocuses 

 galore to take up the running long before the present 

 display is finished or tired of. There is blossom in 

 the Alpine garden too. The chief of the groundlings 

 is the Manchurian Adonis, pushing up great blossoms 

 like a brighter and larger colt's-foot, but destined to 

 unfold a leaf finely cut as parsley and huge as plane. 

 The earliest of our rhododendrons has been blossom- 

 ing for nearly a fortnight, and its branches are still 

 lit with startlingly bright mauve flowers. It is R. 

 dauricum, still too little known, and the most cheerful 

 shrub that can grace an English garden. R, compactum 

 follows closely after it, the buds already bursting their 

 cerements, and by its side the especially precocious 

 Magnolia, well-known as stellata, daily expands its 

 hare's-foot-like buds under the pressure of the flowers 



