Like the débris of winter stands the hellebore in all the wild places, and the butcher’s broom is flaunting its last bright red berry. Hellebore is Christmas roses, but in Tuscany the flowers never come white. They emerge out of the grass towards the end of December, flowers wintry of winter, and they are delicately pale green, and of a lovely shape, with yellowish stamens. They have a peculiar wintry quality of invisibility, so lonely rising from the sere grass, and pallid green, held up like a little hand-mirror that reflects nothing. At first they are single upon a stem, short, and lonely, and very wintry-beautiful, with a will not to be touched, not to be noticed. One instinctively leaves them alone. But as January draws towards February, these hellebores, these greenish Christmas roses become more assertive. Their pallid water-green becomes yellower, pale sulphur-yellow-green, and they rise up, they are in tufts, in throngs, in veritable bushes of greenish open flowers, assertive, bowing their faces with a hellebore assertiveness. In some places they throng among the bushes and above the water of the stream, giving the peculiar pale glimmer almost of primroses, as you walk among them. Almost of primroses, yet with a coarse hellebore leaf, and an uprearing hellebore assertiveness, like snakes of winter.
And as one walks among them, one brushes the last scarlet balls off the butcher’s broom. This low little shrub is the Christmas holly of Tuscany, only a foot or so high, with a vivd red berry stuck on in the middle of its sharp, hard leaf. In February the last red ball rolls off the prickly plume, and winter rolls with it. The violets already are emerging from the moisture.
But before the violets make any show, there are the crocuses. If you walk up through the pinewood that lifts its umbrellas of pine so high, up till you come to the brow of the hill at the top, you can look south, due south, and see snow on the Apennines, and on a blue afternoon, seven layers of blue-hilled distance.
Then you sit down on that southern slope, out of the wind, and there it is warm, whether it be January of February, tramontana or not. There the earth has been baked by innumerable suns, baked and baked again: moistened by many rains, but never wetted for long. Because it is rocky, and full to the south, and sheering steep in the slope.
And there, in February, in the funny baked desert of that crumbly slope, you will find the first crocuses. On the sheer aridity of crumbled stone you see a queer, alert little star, very sharp, and quite small. It has opened out rather flat, and looks like a tiny single freesia flower, creamy, with a smear of yellow yolk. It has no stem, seems to have been just lightly dropped on the crumbled, baked rock. It is the first hill-crocus.
