The Colorful Lenten Rose
Have you the Lenten rose (Helleborus orientalis) in your garden? Even those who know and cherish the lovely Christmas rose (Helleborus niger) often fail to add the related species that wakes the other spring flowers. It comes even before the early snowdrops, aconite and crocus.
The Lenten rose delights us fairly early in the new year and its beautiful white-flowered sister may see the old year out. Both bloom even when the ground is frozen. If the low night temperatures leave them limp and apparently lifeless in early morning, they revive as soon as the sun’s rays strike, and hold their blossoms aloft throughout the winter day. Both are very long-lasting cut flowers and make exquisite winter arrangements. And both prefer a humid climate, plenty of moisture at their roots, summer shade and winter sun. They last longer in the garden if they are protected from the full force of blizzards.
In recent years, some hybridizers have made the hellebores their hobby flower and have created Lenten roses of better coloring than the wine and purple of the species. From the humid Puget Sound region, where they grow as riotously as in their native Greece and other parts of Europe, one can now obtain Lenten roses of white, sometimes flecked with black, and sometimes edged with dark purple. Of the Christmas rose (H. niger altifolius) there are several named varieties.
The Lenten roses I describe came to me merely as H. orientalis hybrids, and were shipped in bloom in early spring. They seem to me an especially fine addition to the hardy hellebores, lengthening the winter bloom considerably and affording spectacular displays of flowers on well-established plants. In Denver, Colorado, it takes three years to achieve a large and showy clump. Under less adverse conditions, it would probably take less time. However long it takes, I consider the result well worth the time.
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