Laura

Michael Weishan, author of The New Traditional Garden: A Practical Guide to Creating and Restoring Authentic American Gardens for Homes of All Ages (1999), dates the introduction of Helleborus orientalis to American gardens as 1850. You may find his dated plant list very helpful in your research. You should also consult Restoring American Gardens: An Encyclopedia of Heirloom Ornamental Plants 1640-1940 by Denise Wiles Adams. (2004) Hellebores have been the subject of very extesive breeding programs for some time now. While I do think Lenten roses would be appropriate in your garden, many of the hybrids now available would be different in form and aspect than a garden hellebore of 1909, but you could doubtless find older cultivars if you wanted to keep strictly to the period.

Enjoy yourself—I’m sure you’ll have a very wide range of beautiful plants to choose from.

Any light you can shed on this will be warmly appreciated. Thank you.
Phyllis Ginsberg

Helleborus niger was so called because of the black roots characteristic of the species, without regard to the color of the flowers, which are white. I was not aware of the Danish publication on hellebores, but am interested to learn that the Danish name for our Lenten rose is Easter bell.

Thank you for the information,
Deirdre

Thank you so much for your etymological explication. I am very familiar with antonymy in the context of ancient religion—e.g., naming the Furies not as the Erinyes, the angry ones, but as the Eumenides, the kindly ones. I have not encountered an antonymous name for an ancient plant before. While your parallel with the Greek designations for right and left is clear, is it possible that hellebore was invoked as a magico-medicinal ally in remote antiquity, and that the flattering name was used to placate an entity perceived as powerful to do harm? Let me know what you think when you have the time.

Regards,
Deirdre

I just came across a new book: Juleroser og Påskeklokker (Christmas Roses and Easter Bells) by Claus Dalby, in Danish. Maybe you haven’t seen it yet ~ http://bit.ly/bfqvPI

The word is a compound. On linguistic grounds, its first element (helle-)has been supposed to come from Arcadian (Arcadia being in fact a pastoral area, a land of grazing) and to mean “good” (corresponding to classical Greek esthlos, which, in Arcadian, was (h)eslos > (h)ellos).

The fact that a toxic plant is considered good — and named on this basis — may seem strange. However, it is an antonym (that is, using a name that signifies the exact opposite of what the object is about, particularly when this object is considered to be negative [here toxic]).

This linguistic use was not rare in Antiquity. The clearest case is the concept of “left”: since the left side was considered to be negative (it was linked with the death), “left” was called “the best [side]” in ancient Greek, while the right side was just called “the right side”.

Returning to helleboros, calling it a “good grazing” was a way to flag the plant as toxic.

Through this process of antonymy, we discover that ancient Greeks — already in a remote Antiquity, well before Classical Antiquity — were perfectly aware of the toxic effects of hellebore. This is the interest of this type of research, which transforms words into keys to understand how ancient populations (in the specific case here, the Greeks) viewed the world and constructed such vision in a coherent way.

Hope this helps.

Alain Touwaide
Scientific Director
Institute for the Preservation of Medical Traditions
http://medicaltraditions.org
research@medicaltraditions.org