Garden News (UK)

Martin Fish’s top tip to show off the beauty of hellebores

My tips should stop blooms in your indoor display from wilting

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The range and variety of hellebores available to gardeners is better than it has ever been, and once establishe­d in borders the plants produce a good show of flowers from February through until late April. Nowadays, new hybrids are all classified as Helleborus hybridus, because they’re all crosses of different species to create new plants with interestin­g flowers.

As long as you can provide a fertile, humus-rich soil and a little dappled shade, the plants will thrive and often they’ll cross pollinate and produce seedlings around the base of the main plants. These can easily be grown on and when the plants are two or three years old they’ll flower, although the flowers will vary from the parent plants. Having said that, you can get some lovely colours, and many of the flowers will have speckled marking. Lots of the hellebores I grow in my garden are seedlings and every year I grow on a few more of the self-set plants to spread them around.

As well as enjoying the blooms in the garden, hellebore flowers can also be picked and brought inside as cut flowers, where they look very stately! However, if you’ve picked the flowers before, you’ll know that they soon wilt and nod their heads.

To prevent this from happening a top flower arranger once told me that as soon as you pick the flowers, you need to dip the base of the stem in boiling water for a minute or two. Using a very fine knife blade or scalpel to cut a shallow slit up the stem is also said to help the flowers drink in water and reduce wilting. I was also told that standing the stems in gin works, but I prefer to save it for myself and enjoy it with tonic!

When picked fresh and arranged informally with some foliage, they do look lovely on a cool windowsill.

 ??  ?? Hellebores come in a wide range of colours and are ideal in borders or containers
Hellebores come in a wide range of colours and are ideal in borders or containers
 ??  ?? Mixed hellebores with variegated pi osporum make a lovely display
Mixed hellebores with variegated pi osporum make a lovely display

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