Carol Klein on heavenly hellebores and her gardening week
With their definite colours, they're the perfect partner for snowdrops
Aren’t hellebores the most exciting flowers to come across in a bleak, wintry garden? Even with their heads bowed gently to protect their pollen, they provide splashes of colour to liven up the otherwise dark expanses of soil, their only associates colonies of snowdrops. The two make perfect companions, the dainty white bells forming the perfect understorey to the solid leaves, stems and to the flowers of the hellebores with their definite colours.
In actual fact we’re in the process of cutting back the leaves here, as we do every year. We remove them all even though many of them are still in fine fettle, if we leave them there's always the risk that any disease may spread. What’s more this process enables the flowers and new leaves to emerge unfettered.
Fifty years ago Helleborus hybridus, the Lenten rose, would have been an unusual sight. Though they were sometimes used in Victorian shrubberies, they fell out of fashion. Nowadays they’re among the most desirable of plants probably for two reasons.
Firstly, us gardeners are far more inclined to think of our gardening as a '12 months of the year' activity than once we were. Consequently, we need plants that are at their best in winter just as much as those that burgeon and blossom in midsummer.
Secondly, the advances in the breeding of hellebores have given rise to an ever-broadening range of plants with an array of colours, markings, forms and shapes we could hardly have imagined a few decades ago. Everyone has their own preferences, some people adore doubles and flowers with anemone centres, others go for pure shapes with rounded sepals in self colours, deep crimson or yellow.
There have even been attempts to breed plants with flowers that look up, a pointless exercise since flowers hang their heads for protection. What’s more, such flowers would deprive us of one of the most enjoyable hellebore activities, kneeling to turn flowers upwards so we can appreciate them fully, perhaps with magical markings or fascinating colouring and patterns, especially exciting in the case of new plants whose flowers are being seen for the first time.
If you hybridise your own hellebores, you would be turning up a flower that you’ve helped to create and as buds swell, anticipation mounts. Some of our ‘Made at Glebe Cottage’ hellebores are flowering for the first time; you pray for warm days to open the buds and allow a glimpse of what’s to come.
'You pray for warm days to open the buds and allow a glimpse of what’s to come'