Hell-BORES No More

 

I have been piddling along on the Lenten rose slow lane for years. My garden is not well stocked with new breeding. Possession of my old hellebores—with downward facing flowers, may be considered a deadly gardening sin, but only because the evidence points to being slothful and contrary. Though I grow two strains of colorful erectile-functioning single Lenten roses purchased long ago, few friends stop to point them out as the bee’s knees. No one has challenged me and asked, “Why don’t you grow more upward facing or double hellebores?”

The indisputable truth… I have never seen any Lenten rose that didn’t look good floating in a shallow bowl of water.

“I know, everyone does it. But it is a wow!”

   Anne Wareham

You can float all of them whether they are the priciest newcomers or 50-year-old hangdog, Helleborus x hybridus passalongs from granny’s overgrown garden. And, yes, a few doubles could add a dimension—just don’t overdo it.

Great Dixter’s Christopher Lloyd jokingly called the whole lot: “hell-BORES.”

My heart bleeds

Heaven forbid every pendulous flowering plant be doomed by breeders.

Does a hanging bleeding heart (Dicentra spectablis) beg for erectile improvement? Or a fuchsia or a snowdrop (Galanthus)?

Mary Vaananen and Abi Rennekamp  held each of my hands this Lenten season. I was trying to make sense of fashionable erectile functioning (upward or outward facing flowers). They sent photos of floating hellebores that included “new and improved” cultivars.  I admit…Their floaters were beautiful.

Mary, a popular Guest Ranter, said, “I think Lenten roses are the most amazing plants. Tough as nails, with gorgeous blooms that withstand freezing temps. The exquisiteness of the hellebore flower seems magnified by the usually brown/gray wintery backdrop of the garden. They are so welcome as our hunger for spring and green and warmth peaks.”

Where have I been all these years?

Mary and Abi’s photos made me feel as if I had been in a cloistered monastery for half a lifetime, putzing around alone with a deck half full of hellebores.

Abi came out to the farm a few weeks ago and brought the sweetest small vase of flowers that included littler daffodils, a pinkish-red Corydalis and a long-stalked cut bloom of a semi-double Lenten Rose. ‘Peppermint Ice’ had not been stripped of its dangling charm.

As an object of art, Abi also schooled me on the scope of 21st century hellebore breeding, and then demonstrated the possibilities by sending me a Derletzwolf Instagram photo. His extraordinary Lenten rose bouquet was reminiscent of the richness and mood of Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750), the “Grand Dame” of Dutch floral painting. 

I can’t remember my last Lenten rose purchase

Years ago, I seem to recall, I bought a white with burgundy splashes from my friends Judith and Dick Tyler at Pine Knot Farms in Virginia. The yellows came from the legendary English hellebore breeder Elizabeth Strangman. The darkest of dark ones may have come from the well-known O’Byrnes in Oregon.

Dick Tyler of Pine Knot Farms looked at photos of these and said there was no way to tell where they had come from.

There is little doubt, the publication of Hellebores—A Comprehensive Guide, published in 2006, accelerated the fascination of every backyard Gregor Mendel, willing to shun peas for Lenten roses. The book co-authored by Judith Tyler and C. Colston Burrell includes a botanic and historic accounting of hellebores, with details about influencers from herbalist John Gerard (1545-1612) to gardeners, botanists and breeders of the current era. Lots of geeky morphology, a thorough accounting of hellebores species, simple how-to wisdom and propagation advice. I should have paid closer attention to the their breeding tips.

I got on board with Helleborus x hybridus thirty ago, sort of. Derailment never happened, but there was a long delay at the station.

Patience has its virtues

Remarkably, I had not seen any results of my open-pollinated yellow strain cross until ten days ago. A few years ago, I gave two of my seedlings from my upward facing plants to Mike Rogers, my friend and neighbor. He showed me the results ten days ago. One was a fine yellow, the other a pale yellow with red splashes. My first flowering yellow seedlings in 30 years!

Clearly, I have been asleep at the wheel, relying on dumb luck, unable to steer yellow or black-flowering seedlings in any direction. Rose and I had gotten sidetracked with scree plants, hundreds of perennials, a vegetable garden, planting hundreds of trees, and thousands of daffodils. Hellebores got the short end of the stick.

Back in Salvisa, the whites with a burgundy splash have been productive. Helleborus x hyrbidus can be a spreader. (To be  clear: I am talking about an in-house self-seeding machine.)

 Lenten roses (Helleborus x hyrbidus ) often lacks self-control.

Profligacy has its benefits

And you can save a hefty sum.

I have dozens of clumps of white hellebores with burgundy splashes, and 10,000 more waiting in the wings if you count the flood of new seedlings every year. 

And I do mean flood…(We had a previous flood in February. I am becoming a sump pump expert with help from Ben Miller, a friend, who helped renovate our house thirteen years ago. Ben replaced a dead pump a day before the heavy rains set in and inspected downspouts and drain pipes.)

 Hell-YEAH, not hell-BORES, when the floodwaters rose last week. We had  10 +” of rain over four days. 

Sharpen your trowel and be ready to release the overflow before blooms fade. Help your Lenten rose refugees find a new garden sanctuary before the river rises again.

To paraphrase the Gospel of Luke: To whom thousands of Lenten rose seedlings are gifted, much is expected.

If you don’t have your own seed-producing plants of Lenten rose, or your friends with hellebores are miserly, you can order fresh Helleborus x hybridus seeds from Jelitto Perennial Seeds for delivery this summer. Sow them in a garden bed ASAP upon receipt and mark where you put them. Hellebore seeds will need a warm period, mimicking the natural outdoor temperatures of summer and fall, followed by a cold, winter period. Germination commences in mid-late March in central Kentucky.

Whenever I dig a handful of seedlings from for friends, I am met with bewilderment. “You expect these puny white roots to live?” I am stern. “Yes, plant them as soon as you get home. These little seedlings are incredibly tough and are more difficult to transplant, with longer roots, when the first true leaves appear.”

My memory bank

Thousands of Latin names for genus and species can still be dredged up, but my bank vault door got slammed on cultivar names a while ago. I remember my best childhood friend’s 1960 home phone number, but I draw a blank if you ask me to name a single new hellebore cultivar in the last ten years. Or the names of cultivars of echinaceas and heucheras for that matter, though I have grown a few of each.

New plants are introduced annually with a flourish. (Guilty as charged: I wrote catalog pomp for nearly 40 years.)

Even I am not immune to bravado, but I am more patient.

Plus, I have a home-grown deal that is hard to beat.

Every year I sow perennial seeds from Jelitto Perennial Seeds and the North American Rock Garden Society (NARGS).  Keys to the Jelitto seed vault are at my disposal. (I was gifted free seeds when I retired from Jelitto in 2017 after 22 years on the happy seed trail with this great seed company.) And the annual NARGS seed exchange pushes the range of my possibilities, as well as failures, in our hot and humid summers, and cold and wet winters.

Catalog shopping has always been enjoyable, but I rely more now on word of mouth or being seduced when I see a new plant in a friend’s garden or a local garden center.

There was a lot of catching up to do from years past

Pine Knot’s Dick Tyler and I talked for an hour last week a few days before heavy rains set in. We caught up on kids, grandkids and old friends. I go way back with Dick and his late wife Judith. No one laughed as easily and as well as they did. They grew a wonderful family business, specializing in hellebores, now run by Brian Byers, a talented horticulturist who came to Pine Knot one week after graduating with a degree in horticulture from North Carolina State University in 2016. He took over the nursery reins in 2023.

Now 81, Dick lives on the Clarksville, Virginia, farm that has been cultivated by Judith’s family for six generations—seven generations if you count the grandkids.

Dick Tyler’s soft-spoken enthusiasm for hellebores is  convincing

As we talked, I picked up on his unwavering devotion to a single genus. Not only for the breeding potential of Lenten roses (Helleborus x hybridus) but Christmas roses, stinking hellebores and interspecies hybrids—and for the love of wild species that extend from Southern and Central Europe (Spain, France and Germany and the Balkans) to the Mediterranean (Italy and Greece) to Turkey and the Caucasus. Will McLewin, the British plant explorer and hellebore expert, led Dick, Judith and Colston Burrell to study and photograph  the hellebore-rich Balkans, in preparation for their book.

We talked about my poke-along yellow hellebore hybrids. Mine seldom set seed. Dick and Judith had long done hand pollination of their best yellow hybrids, and their controlled hellebore crosses are still made in screened greenhouses. Dick said Pine Knot’s yellow Lenten roses are not shy about setting viable seed.

We now know who the “hell-BORE” is

Dick didn’t scold me for my Lenten rose shortcomings or my leave of absence from Pine Knot’s winter hellebore open houses, the past three decades.

Flood waters receded.

It didn’t take long to come to my senses.

The sun came out and I went online and fell in love again at Pine Knot Farms.

Hell-BORES no more.

There’s a lot to love.