Grecian Hellebore Two interesting postscripts to wild daphne and green
hellebore. A correspondent reports the daphne as having' been very common, at one time on the Wiltshire-Somerset borders, and now says that he finds it very common in the gardens of Belfast, and wonders whether its presence there is an indication of strong Old English influences. (The green daphne, Daphne Lauriola, is of course far commoner, and is now in flower, making small rhododendron-like shrubs .in. chalk woods, handsome, charming and, like all the family, fragrant.) A note on the hellebore, which another correspondent reports as being extremely common in Hampshire, is more topical. An officer of the last war writes to say that it " grows fairly pro- fusely in thine parts of Macedonia—the Struma Valley for example— in which our armies were stationed during the last war. I used often to dismount from my 'horse and pick them when riding through the wooded valleys of the uplands." He describes it as having been used by the peasants as an application for wounds, to stop, bleeding. And in some other respects it seems a topical plant, for a purgation of Hellebore is, according to Gerrard, " good for mad and furious men, for melancholy, dull and heavie persons, and briefly for all those that are troubled with blacke choler, and molested with melancholy."
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