Sometimes (to be honest quite often), if you also have your dogs around while taking pictures for your digital herbarium, this kind of accidents can happen. 🤭
This is Frizz, a few seconds before he trampled this beautiful helleborus purpurascens down… So we took it home. Unfortunately they don’t like it indoors, it died in less then 24 hours, probably because it was too hot inside. So if you find some, don’t pick them up, just take a minute and admire them, take some pictures and leave them alone.

Christmas roses are winter flowering perennials. It flowers in late winter and early spring. It is not evergreen. All parts are poisonous to humans (and probably for pets too), but the flowers provide useful a nectar source for early foraging insects. Its leaves are dark green, some with purple tinges, and they appear after the flowers. The flowers are open, cup-shaped, and five-petaled. They have a beautiful dark purple color, with creamy stamens and a ring of envelope shaped nectaries which are gold and streaked with dark purple. You can gently turn the flower upright so you can appreciate the full beauty of it.