Their names may not trip off the tongue, but the exquisite spring flowers of the Hellebore are a full-skirted feast for the eye.
LIKE SO MANY other gardeners of my acquaintance, I am something of a hellebore junkie, an oddly addictive but relatively harmless habit that I first acquired in my teens. And so, in the way that others might crave the taste of a handmade chocolate or covet couture clothes, rare white truffles or Graff diamonds, I have slavered at the thought of growing the elegant Balkan species H. torquatus from seed, sulked when my H. niger plants upped and died, and drooled at the sight of the black double-flowered H. ‘Midnight Ruffles’ (yes, the names are a mouthful). In fact, the only time in my life I’ve ever seriously contemplated grand horticultural larceny was while on holidays in Croatia, when I discovered swathes of hellebores (a species unknown to me) growing in mixed woodland on an Adriatic island, close to the ruins of a centuries-old monastery. In the end, I didn’t, but oh, how I was tempted.
My fascination has a lot to do with the hellebore’s exquisite spring flowers, which resemble nothing so much as silk ballgowns in a Cecil Beaton photograph – intensely hued and wonderfully full-skirted, sometimes frilled or ruffled, daintily freckled or even picotee, so that the outer edges of the petals (more properly “sepals”) appear to have been delicately dipped in ink. In a mild year, the Lenten rose (Helleborus x hybridus) can begin flowering in January and continue right through to March or even April. I like to pick the individual blossoms and then float them, upended like miniature boats, in shallow bowlfuls of water – a table decoration that always gives great pleasure. Its flowers aside, the Lenten rose’s evergreen foliage as well as that of the Corsican hellebore, H. argutifolius, and Helleborus foetidus are also decorative in the winter garden.
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