Originally Posted by shack

Thank you for any help you can provide! I would love to identify the plant described in the following novel - if it is a real plant - and to know anything about the lore that might attach to the plant and its flower.

The novel _The Graveyard Book_, by Neil Gaiman, is set in a graveyard in an unidentified town in England. In a chapter entitled "Danse Macabre", the residents of the graveyard and of The Old Town engage in "a local tradition" that is triggered by the flowers blossoming in winter for the first time in eighty years. The Lady Mayoress is assisted in cutting enough flowers to fill four baskets, and she and others distribute the flowers to all residents of the Old Town, pinning each flower to the lapel of a passer-by.

More clues:
Neil Gaiman is very interested in Norse and Celtic mythology, and he uses themes, characters and incidents from those traditions throughout his books.

Gaiman's version of The Danse Macabre follows the distribution of the flowers. He seems to base it on the Camille Saint-Saëns version which is apparently based on an old French superstition: According to the superstition, "Death" appears at midnight every year on Halloween. Death has the power to call forth the dead from their graves to dance for him while he plays his fiddle. His skeletons dance for him until the first break of dawn, when they must return to their graves until the next year.

I'm not an expert on the Celtic calendar, but it may be that the "local tradition" in the book combines Yule and Halloween (Samhain) elements.

The narrator mentions that the Danse Macabre is taking place in midwinter, and snow begins to fall the following day.


Here are the relevant passages from the book:
There was a strange scent in the air, sharp and floral. Bod followed it up the hill to the Egyptian Walk, where the winter ivy hung in green tumbles, an evergreen tangle . . .
The perfume was heaviest there, and for a moment Bod wondered if snow might have fallen, for there were white clusters on the greenery. Bod examined a cluster more closely. It was made of small five-petaled flowers, and he had just put his head in to sniff the perfume when he heard footsteps coming up the path. . .
[The lady mayoress] began to cut the clumps of blossoms, and she and the three men started to fill the baskets with flowers. . .
"It's not surprising that the previous Lord Mayor did not know about this tradition," said the chubby man, whose basket was almost full. "It's the first time the winter blossoms have bloomed in eighty years."
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"It was a tradition in the Old Town," said the man, "before the city grew up around it. When the winter flowers bloom in the graveyard on the hill, they are cut and given out to everybody, man or woman, young or old, rich or poor."


I thought the plant might be a Christmas Rose or Lenten Rose, but those bloom more often than every eighty years. Since the narrator refers to "winter ivy," I thought that might be the answer, but I couldn't picture someone without a ladder cutting enough ivy blossoms to fill four baskets, or making boutineers of the blossoms. Websites also indicated that the smell of ivy blossoms would not be a "perfume".

I hope you can help me to solve this mystery!