It is almost a hellebore time

Hybrid hellebore

I can't remember how I got my first hellebore, years back in LT garden. Probably it was accidental or gardening magazine inspired buy, way before we started to look things up online. I did not see much of it blooming, because we hardly ever visited our garden so early in the spring, but I still liked the plant, with its lingering spent flowers sticking around for a couple of months.

Over here, in NL, I grew a few of them over the years, mostly impulse buys or gifted. A few years ago we found out about Hellebore days in the local plant nursery nearby, in Eenrum, which also expanded a collection a bit. They are not very easy to grow in the clay soils, but most plants that I have lost was due to the replanting rather than growing conditions or bad placement in general (full sun is not their favorite). It is still a plant I cannot imagine a garden without though, first to bloom in the spring, sometimes starting as early as Christmas (hence the name, Christmas rose).

Helleborus niger

The most common hellebore, available in many shops in the spring, is helleborus niger, with its typical white (sometimes pink) blossoms, dark stems and evergreen leaves. Originally it is a mountain plant, growing in the wild in Southern European mountain ranges. As it is the case with many other wild plants, it can be difficult to grow in the garden. It does not like too acid soils, nor clay, nor poor, dry conditions (unlike some other alpine plants) and it is not fond of full sun. It seems to do best in a dappled shade, with a "forest" soil: a sort of composty turf, preferably with rotten leaves mixed through, well drained, but not ash-dry. I moved mine this year to live under an apple tree, we will see how he responds to this. Hopefully it will do better than sulking in our front garden, where it bloomed rather ok, but slowly kept declining. It did self seed though, mostly in between the tiles, so I can imagine that it could form a rather big thicket if the conditions were more close to its nature home.

Helleborus argutifolius

One of my favorites is Helleborus argutifolius, aka Corsican hellebore. It is a big plant, forming about a 1 meter high mound of large spiky leaves, carried on stems, giving it somewhat a holly-ish appearance when it is not in bloom. It seems to like a bit of morning sun and dry sandy soil, with a bit of shade in the height of the summer; and it certainly enjoyed a sheltered position next to a warm wall. While it is supposedly hardy up to the z5 (something I am inclined to doubt), the blooms could get a frost damage if the temperatures spiked very low (happens here in end of January, beginning of February sometimes). Otherwise the flowers were lasting very long and it was one of the first hellebores to bloom in the garden.
Replanting it to a more shady spot did not seem to be very successful though, either it was not his favorite conditions, considering that originally it is a Mediterranean island plant, or it was too big plant at that point to be moved without the consequences of a replanting-shock. I am planning to try a dappled shade aspect with a young plant this year and place it in a more sheltered spot, where it is not exposed to the wind. Hopefully, I will have more success with it there, especially since it was a favorite early spring stop for the bumble bees.

Helleborus foetidus

Another distinct hellebore variety is Helleborus foetidus, aka stinking hellebore. As most of the other hellebores, it is evergreen and can grow up to 80cm tall/wide if it is happy; most plants I have seen around here however were smaller than that. The original species one has light green, bell shaped flowers, which appear early in the winter here; but there are some more special cultivars, with brighter green flowers, red tinted leaves, etc. Regardless the name, it is not particularly stinky, nor I have noticed any smell to speak off in general; in early spring bees seem to like it as much as they do other helleborus in the garden. It is said to like some dappled shade, but in a deeper shady aspect, where I had it planted, it was rather short-lived, declining rapidly after a few years of growing.

Apart of he species hellebores, there are many interspecies hybrids. One of the first were helleborus orientalis (which nowadays is considered to be Helleborus × hybridus) hybrids with a few related species, which hugely improved the color range of the flowers. There are many attractive cultivars these days, ranging from purple, almost black to pink and from white to yellow shades; and of course there all all those pretty doubles, which look really amazing in the garden.

Hybrid Hellebore

Many of these new hybrids are generally rather easy to care for, growing well in the similar conditions as the usual helleborus niger. Regarding their positioning in the garden design, black/dark purple flowers are very unusual and attractive, but they tend to "disappear" in the background of dark soil, so they look their best if there is some sort of white spring flowers planted to accompany them, or near some white garden features to make them stand out better.

Also an important thing to know when adding any kind of helleborus to the garden is that all of them are poisonous to some extent, and should not be digested by humans (aka kids) and pets. It is not a good plant to place around pet enclosures, or where the pets tend to hang around in the garden, places like backdoors, sunny benches and such. Roaming pets probably can tell the difference and generally leave it alone, but if it is the only plant in the garden, they might be tempted to at least taste it. In humans it usually just causes unpleasant symptoms, but even then it is better to take precautions than worry later, especially with the very small kids, who are too young to grasp the differences between various plants in the garden.