Category: Our Garden

This year’s Christmas roses

Some people might have noticed that I really like Christmas roses. I am really charmed by the roundy buttercup family flowers, even though I don’t know why. (If you are interested in our garden, please see the [Seasons in the shady garden] page on the Nishigawa Kobo web site.)

Since we moved here, to this house we found through a web search in our former country, we’ve been planting Christmas roses in our small garden. They have been most impressive this year. It was a very good result for our garden. This shady garden didn't have only bad results, and it was fairly well suited to these flowers. There are some small ones that never bloom even though they are four or five years old, because they have too poor sunshine. I heard that Christmas roses usually bloom in their second or third year. We can’t buy expensive ones already in bloom in their pot, so we plant a few small ones every year. Which means, we are not sure of the colour or of how many spots will appear on the flower until it blooms. It’s kind of interesting.

Personaly, I like white, light green, dark purply red flowers without spots. I usually don’t prefer pink flowers but I accept it in Christmas roses! It’s like a fond parent.

There are still some plants that haven’t bloomed yet this year so I’m looking forward to seeing how they will be next year. I don’t like cold weather, but these plants are just about the only pleasure in our winter garden.

Formally, only H. niger is called ‘Christmas rose’: H. orientalis is called a ‘Lenten rose’. Both are officially hellebores.

28 March 2005