the.com/hellebore
The flower that blooms through snow and once doubled as ancient chemical warfare.
means Hellebore is any of several winter-flowering plants of the genus Helleborus (and related plants), poisonous to ingest, that bloom in the cold months and were used in antiquity as both medicine and poison.
from From Greek helléboros, the name of the plant. The Greeks distinguished a black hellebore and a white one, and the ancients prized it as a purgative and a supposed cure for madness — to be "sent to Anticyra," the town famed for the stuff, was to be told you needed your head examined. The deeper roots of the Greek word are murky; one old guess ties it to a sense of "food that kills" or "fawn fodder," but that's uncertain and best treated as speculation rather than fact.
- winter bloomer
- Flowers defiantly in frost, hence Christmas rose
- siege weapon
- Ancient Greeks poisoned a city's water supply with it
- madness cure
- Healers prescribed it for insanity, often fatally
- buttercup kin
- Belongs to the deceptively pretty Ranunculaceae family
- all toxic
- Every part can stop a human heart
christmas rose — helleborus niger blooming in winter gardens across europe, flowering december-february
lenten rose — helleborus orientalis, the most common garden hellebore, blooming during lent in spring