Tag Archives | hellebores

The Cultivated Palette Series – Hellebores

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I have been cutting back the old leaves on my Hellebores this week followed by a quick weed and mulch. My favorite tool of all time the Japanese Razor Hoe does a great job at getting all those pesky weeds out that like to colonize around the crown of the plant.

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I don’t think they have enjoyed this mild winter, there is a lot of black spot around so I think a good mulch will help keep the spores from being splashed up on to the emerging flowers.

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Hopefully in a months time they will be looking something like these which were photographed in March last year by photographer Clare West. We got together a few times last year and focused on just one flower on each occasion, so I thought it would be fun to share these beautiful images with you over the coming months in a series of blog posts called The Cultivated Palette. I will include lots of growing tips and recommendations for sourcing stock plants and seeds and I will share some thoughts on why I choose to include them in my ‘palette’ of plants for cutting.

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I am going to have another go at hand pollination next month. I will have to select a mother and father plant from each variety, based on stem length, good flower shape and general vigor. This Harvington double pink is a good example, the plant has formed a big clump relatively quickly with long stems and well you can see heart-breakingly beautiful flowers.

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So on a sunny day I will set aside ten minutes and go to my Hellebore bed armed with a pencil and some odds and ends of yarn. Firstly I rub the end of the pencil over the anthers of a fully open flower on the father plant, then I will select an almost open flower bud from the mother plant and tie a little bow of yarn around its neck.

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It is important that no others pollinators have been there first. I then transfer the pollen from the pencil to the stigma.

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That is all you have to do until the seed ripens around the end of May, the shiny black seeds should be collected and sown on a loam based, gritty compost whilst nice and fresh. They do take a few months to germinate, so keep the seed tray in a cold frame and hopefully by September you will start to see some signs of life.

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All my hellebores were bred by Hugh Harvington whose nursery Twelve Nunns, now run by his daughter Penny Dawson in Lincolnshire, has recently been featured in the January edition of RHS magazine The Garden. They do supply wholesale plug plants, as long as you order ten or more of a variety, they can be potted up and grown on for a season before planting out. Harvington hellebores have a purity of colour which I find very useful for my wedding work. This one below is Harvington single smokey.

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Hellebores are an investment but I cannot resist them, I think they add a subtlety to the more flamboyant and bold spring bulbs and have a good long harvesting period from February to April. Once you grow your own from seed you realize why they are expensive, it takes two years from pollination to the first flower.

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I have found the double forms hold better so I have just placed an order for some more including blush, apricot and double speckled cream…yum! I am establishing a new bed under a line of mature beech trees which should give them a bit of shade in the summer months.

Vase life can be rather fleeting especially before they start to set seeds. I don’t think searing the stems does make much difference, but scoring a line down either side of the stem and then plunging the stems in a deep bucket of water up to their necks overnight seems more successful. I have to confess most of mine are picked in April when my season is in full swing, they are very ripe by then and happily hold for up to two weeks.

The next instalment will be on Anemones which I have just started picking, the earliest harvest recorded here at G&G.

 

My Friend got married in February

My very dear friend Janet told me she was marrying her
partner of 16 years Nick (also an old friend from Art school) “Would you like me to arrange the flowers?” I offered, “ I’d
love you to!” replied Janet. The slight drawback was the wedding date was set
for 9th February.

I don’t usually do winter weddings due to lack of flowers,
but there was no way I wouldn’t have done this one. I didn’t want to let Janet
down, particularly as she had asked me to be a ‘best woman’, which was an
enormous honour.

I suggested hellebores, anemones, viburnum and pussy willow.
Thankfully she loved the sound of all of those. She is a firm believer in
British grown and had really set her heart on all the flowers coming from the
garden. All I could do was watch and hope. I watched the flooding and the snow.
I cringed at the hard frosts and gave weekly reports on their progress.  Finally the weather was kind during the
first week of February and all was well. In the end it was only the delicate
little viburnum that suffered, as most had gone brown from frost.

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Photography by Stephanie Rushton

The hellebores were stunning, but they were tricky. Mostly
due to it being so early, too early to pick them really. The heads hung down
and I knew they wouldn’t be terribly reliable out of water. They worked well in
little bud vases and nestled into the bouquet.

 

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photography by Rachel Siegfried

I also worked them into the buttonholes with pussy willow
and rosemary. Janet and the best women all wore them in their hair (apart
from me who loves an excuse to wear a hat) I advised all the girls to keep an
eye on each others hellebore hair flowers and make sure they remove them at the
first signs of wilting. I’d say we got about 3 hours out of them, which isn’t
so bad for early February.

 

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The table centres were quite simple jugs of anemones,
hellebores and pussy willow.

 

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The pussy willow was a joy and worked brilliantly with
Janet’s fur jacket. I ran it through all of the arrangements. I used tiny
sprigs right through to some very long branches which went into an enamel
pitcher on the bar. The most important thing was Janet was really thrilled. It
was a great day and it gave me a good feeling to make a friend happy,
especially on her wedding day.

 

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Photography by Stephanie Rushton

Jo Wise    

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Celebrating the Hellebore

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I decided to take a break from shovelling muck, lifting and dividing perennials, pruning roses and sowing annuals to play with hellebores. They took a hammering back in February with that cold snap but after trimming off the damaged leaves and stems they are looking better than ever. I have given them a feed with some of our chicken poo, turbo charged, home made compost and if I get round to it I really should do some hand pollinating and save some seed for the new woodland area we are creating. So many of my favourite flowers for cutting are shade lovers; in an open field shade is a rather precious commodity. We have a line of large beech trees underplanted with nettles, after four years I am ready for a change…

 

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Anyway, back to the hellebores! A couple of years ago I bought a job lot of these little lovelies from Hugh Nunn at Harvington Hellebores in Evesham. I had seen an article about his hellebores in Gardens Illustrated and was seduced by the beautiful pictures of them, he has been breeding them for twenty years to get some really bright distinctive colours. I am now the proud owner of single and double- flowered varieties in yellow, white, apricot, picotee, pink, red and black. For arranging they can be tricky, I usually wait until they are forming their seed heads. At this stage they hold very well and will be happy in a vase for at least a week. If you want to enjoy them before that they either need to be cut very short and seared or floated in a bowl of water. I could not resist displaying them on my rather weary whippet Violet, I think she is a bit fed up of being my flower model!

 

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Our polytunnel is now bursting with spring bulbs so the mail order and our Saturday shop are open for business again. We are offering more delivery days this year (Wednesday, Thursday and Friday) and a couple of new ways to enjoy our flowers: 'Best of the Bunch' and 'DIY Cut Flowers in a Box'.

'Best of the Bunch' will be a pure and simple bunch of one of our favourites, starting with our anemones and followed by sweet peas, peonies, dahlias and whatever else is in abundance and looking gorgeous.

 

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The 'DIY Cut Flowers in a Box' will be a box full of foliage, filler and focal flowers for people to arrange themselves to have a few arrangements around the house or perhaps for an event.

 

This week sees the start of the wedding season and my first growing course. We are fully booked for March but still have a few places on the April dates.

 

 

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