Hellebore
Helleborus sp.
Hellebore · Brooklyn Botanic Garden · 2 April 2026
Pure white petals - technically sepals, which is why they hold their colour and shape for weeks rather than dropping the way true petals do - around a dense ring of yellow-green nectaries and stamens. A plant of the woodland edges of the Balkans and the Alps, and an early, cold-tolerant bloomer, often up and flowering while there is still snow on the ground.
The nectaries are the real petals, shrunk down to little green cups of nectar for the first bees of the year. The whole plant is poisonous, and the old herbals used it to cure madness, which it did not.
Birds, insects, plants and other wildlife, mostly from Brooklyn, with some from further afield.
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