PIPPA'S SONG

(Google Image)

SINGING THE PRAISES OF CHRISTMAS ROSE

   I had just arrived in the range of perennial greenhouses where the staff were busily stocking the shelves with the 3000 varieties that this large nursery carries. It was mid April and I had entered through the Hosta aisles with over 200 different kinds looking so healthily splendid as those in the garden will be now that the rain has cleared the last of winter's snow.
   The air was fresh and clean and you could smell the awakening soil. Freshly showered and in a laundered shirt, with crisp creases in my pants I felt solid in my safety boots.

   I had been mouthing some half-remembered Browning...
   the year's at the spring...day's at the morn...the lark's on the wing...something,something...God's in his heaven all's right with the world.
  Then I heard a woman's voice calling to her friends that had gone a little ahead. "Don't touch these. They're deadly poisonous." " You mean the Christmas Rose?"   " Yes, she confirmed, the Helleborus." My crisp shirt wilted and my shoulders slumped , "What now? Where are people getting this stuff?   I had read  Hellebores' lore and medical history years ago and scoffed, but this 'poison plant' business was no longer a laughing matter.     Christmas Rose and Lenten Rose are not on the Sick Kids' list and I wondered how they had missed them. The four ladies shopping that morning were teachers who were being allowed to plant some perennials at the school. With the small sum of money provided they were also given a list of plants that would not be safe for children. They had come equipped with an Index Plantorum Prohibitorum.  What a way to start the day.

   Helleborus had been used medicinally but was abandoned as causing more harm than good along with other discredited practices such as bleeding and cupping and constant purging.
   Before refrigeration and other food-handling safety measures people were forced to eat things that would be a public scandal today. Rotting meat, stinking fish and putrid vegetables, that when they churned in your gut you were happy to get their residue out of your body through one end or the other. The use of purges and routine enemas were accepted as normal. Much of our folk knowledge of poisonous plants derives from those dismal days.

   The chemicals in Helleborus include a digitalis-like component as we find in Foxglove. You will have to read my story The Case of the Dorset Boy to realize how much it takes to create even a sub-lethal dose.
 How ridiculous.
   To make a case against Christmas Rose the minutest facts have to be stretched beyond breaking point. Nothing and nobody eats the thick evergreen leaves of Hellebore.
   You will not find Christmas Rose growing wild in these parts (Wouldn't that be nice?)   BUT, just maybe in Europe where they are native, cattle might eat them.  Even having only a bovine brain cattle don't touch them. BUT,BUT. Supposing that the Hellebores are not in the pasture but in a hay field and get harvested with the grasses and then fed to the cows?
   In that case if you are a neighbour to such a careless farmer I would suggest that you don't buy his milk. It is well known that drinking such contaminated milk will give you the 'runs'.   Is there anything else you would like to know ?