I believe it is now pretty well ascertained that the Œnothēra of the ancients was the small Willow-herb (_Epilobium roseum_), which in my own garden is the most familiar of weeds.
Pliny describes it as having exhilarating properties in wine, as having leaves like those of the Almond-tree, a rose-coloured flower, many branches, and a long root, which, when dried, has a vinous smell, and an infusion of which has a soothing effect on wild beasts.
In Baptista Porta’s curious _Phytognomonica_ (published at the end of the sixteenth century) he says,—speaking no doubt of this same Epilobium,—that the dried root of the Œnothēra smells of wine; given as a drink it soothes wild beasts and makes them tame, and rubbed on the worst wounds it serves to heal them.
THE Christmas Rose is certainly one of the most valuable of flowers, but it is a little capricious, growing luxuriantly in one place, and in another gradually dwindling off. With me it is always successful, and one secret may be that the roots are never allowed to be disturbed. This beautiful flower has rather weird associations. It is the Black Hellebore of Pliny, and was used as a poison and in incantations. Spenser plants it with the “dead sleeping poppy” and all other sad and poisonous herbs in the garden of Proserpina. Often, however, it was valued for its medicinal qualities, and was occasionally, we are told, made use of by literary people for the purpose of sharpening up their intellects. Gerard says that “Black Hellebore is good for mad and furious men, for melancholike, dull, and heavie persons, for those that are troubled with the falling sickness, for lepers, for them that are sicke of quartaine ague, and briefly for all those that are troubled with blacke choler, and molested with melancholie.” Cowley, too, has a curious poem, in which the Christmas-flower (as he calls it) speaks, and boasts that, alone of flowers, Winter “still finds me on my guard,” though the ground is “covered thick in beds of snow,” and then it sounds its triumphs over all sorts of ills, physical and mental:
“I do compose the mind’s distracted frame, A gift the gods and I alone can claim.”
Old Dr. Darwin, in his _Loves of the Plants_, has a scientific interest of quite another kind in the Christmas Rose: