I didn’t know what a hellebore was until one unfolded itself out of the barely thawed dirt in the flower bed under Story’s bedroom window in Maine. We moved into the house in March, which I did not then know was still wintertime, and it was one of the first plants to unfurl itself during the very slow shift into spring. This habit of blooming very early — hellebores seems to almost appear out of nowhere in full flower — has earned two varieties of the species a pair of very religious common names: the Lenten rose and the Christmas rose.
There’s a lot of history that goes into those names — hellebores, which are today simply categorized as “poisonous,” where used to treat various ailments during antiquity, landing them in the writings of Pliny and others — but I think of it as a kind of wtf thing too. As in, A flower that’s in bloom around Christmas?? But what was shocking, botanically, when John Gerard described the “Christ herbe” back in 1597 has changed in the era of climate chaos. Because as I write this on December 20th there are still rose-roses that are in full bloom here in Brooklyn.
The seasonal jumble of New York’s almost endless fall has many little symptoms, from the occasional cherry that blossoms, confusedly, while other trees are still in full autumn leaf to the sidewalk irises that die back to the ground only to quickly sprout up again, occasionally opening a flower around Thanksgiving. But to me, it’s the roses that are most emblematic of winter’s gradual erosion. Walking the brownstone blocks in my neighborhood, the haggard red blooms that cover the giant bushes found in many a front yard stand out so dramatically to my eye during what is normally such a drab time of year.
It's hard to cast a flowering rose as bad, but the December bloom is a prime example of the more cultural effects of climate change. If the existential threat of a warming planet takes the shape of calving icebergs and rising high tide lines, then wildly out-of-season flowers are the unnerving backyard reminder of those more violent and often distant realities. The plants that we look to in order to mark the very changing of the seasons are becoming unreliable narrators.
No one plants a rose bush, even an ever-blooming type, expecting winter flowers. Hellebores are a different story. Like camellias (an underutilized plant in New York, imo), or snowdrops and crocuses, they’re planted specifically to lengthen a garden’s bloom. There’s a berm along the Flatbush Avenue edge of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden that’s covered in hellebores, usually blooming early in the New Year. I haven’t been by to check on those recently, but I did see some Christmas roses in flower down by the South Street Seaport over the weekend, suggesting that the hellebores are blooming as early as the roses are blooming late, marking some sort of inflection point.
But with the 25th now less than a week away, I have the very likely answer to my new version of will it be a white Christmas? There’s a polar vortex in the forecast that will bring snow and freezing cold even to parts of the south this week. And while New York City is currently only expected to get rain in the coming days, the temperature could dip into the teens on Christmas Eve, finally bringing a real hard frost to the city. Which means that this will not be the year that roses — real roses, a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose (that’s 4x, just like Stein wrote it) roses — will still be in bloom on Christmas day.