There are so many reasons for hellebores to make you happy. They flower really early in the year, just when you think the garden is never going to come to life again. Their flowers glow in the sunshine and somehow make themselves known to you even when right up the far end of the garden. They cover the ground well, the blooms last for months and their leaves retain their green and graceful shape all year round.
Dark and pale hellebores
There are hundreds of varieties - mine are mostly H. orientalis or lenten rose and there are pale ones, dark ones, spotted ones and even some lovely double ones. I also have a H. niger, or Christmas rose one of which grew in the garden of my boarding school in the North of Scotland and always flowered at Christmas. Here it doesn't flower until January but it is still just ahead of H. orientalis.
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| Single and double hellebores |
Hellebores are basically woodland edge plants so enjoy a bit of shade and leaf-mouldy sort of soil but don't seem put out by my heavy clay - in fact thrive and propagate themselves all around. I do dead head them eventually so they don't use up all their vigour and weaken next year. The usual advice is that they hate being moved, but I have dug mine up many times, replanted them and passed them on to other gardeners and they've all flourished. .
The flowers are rich in pollen and very attractive to bees. (Why is it that when you use a search engine to find out about wildlife friendliness, insects are always assumed to be pests? The whole point of my garden is to encourage insects but it is always assumed I'm trying to kill them rather than provide them as food for the birds.)
Drooping heads make it difficult to see the flowers
The one disadvantage of these lovely plants is that most of them bend their heads forward so you have to get into strange contortions to see inside the flower. If I bring them indoors I float them face up in a shallow bowl of water to get the best effect.
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