"I like to think they are shy," David Walther tells me, speaking of his beloved hellebores. David is co-owner of Spring Fever Nursery in Yankee Hill with his wife Cathy. "Many varieties of hellebores have flowers that face downward because, as winter bloomers, they are trying to protect their pollen from wind and rain and snow until pollination takes place. But the difference between the back of a hellebore's so-called bloom, and its wide – often surprisingly beautiful – face can be a night and day difference."
In David's garden, much of which is beneath tall oaks and conifers, many of the hellebores may hang their faces, but they are not shy. In fact they are growing and blooming with joyful abandon in nooks and crannies, in part sun and in full shade, standing tall and apart from other plants and nestled right up against other woodland plants such as ferns. David has been collecting hellebore's for more than a few years – "5? 7?" he can't exactly remember and many of the plants in his garden are now his own crosses, grown from the self-seeding and hybridizing that hellebores are notorious for – "Shy in stance sometimes, but promiscuous in behavior," David tells me. Many of David's original plants came from Marietta and Ernie O'Byrne hellebore experts in Eugene, Oregon who founded and own Northwest Garden Nursery
The hellebore genus is a member of the Ranunculaceae family of plants, and blooms are generally a rounded cup-shape. The colorful five outer elements of the flower heads are not actually petals, but sepals and as such they persist for a long time. These sepals are often what create the drama in a hellebore, with backsides streaked and veined, or picotee edged a darker color than the rest of the sepal, and with speckled, freckled and veined front sides. The sepals can be double, ruffled and range in color from pure white, warm yellow, pink, burgundy and all the way to an almost inky black. The smaller inner circle of so-called nectaries (petals capable of holding nectar) can range from almost invisible single, to semi-double, to double and colored in sharp contrast to the sepals. The combinations of colors and patterns are seemingly endless and more hybrids come on the market each year. Easily crossed with one another, hellebores are one of those plants in a nursery that you should only buy IN BLOOM, otherwise you can not be sure what the blooms will look like. Specialty catalogue growers offer cloned plants whose bloom color and form should be guaranteed.
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