Hellebores - tips for growing and cutting

Now is the time to plant Hellebores, to give early spring colour in the garden.  These plants love light shade, typically growing at the edge of deciduous woodland.  They also like well drained but moisture retentive soil.  If you do plant Hellebores now, they should be watered throughout the summer for the first year until well established.

After Care

There are a number of species available, such as niger, odorus, and purpuracens, although many will be hybrids, often of the Oriental variety. For aftercare purposes, they may generally be divided into three types, all of which need slightly different treatment.  Hellebore leaves tend to get rather large and tatty, and also show disease such as black spot as they become older.  A good aftercare regime involves removing the old leaves, which in many cases has the added advantage of displaying the flowers to better effect, while getting rid of the pests and disease that they harbour.  The picture on the right is of my own hellebores, from which I removed the leaves about four weeks ago (admittedly leaving it a bit late, because of all the rain).

• The first type of Hellebore is the one which carries its leaves on separate stalks to the flowers.  These are easy - in autumn or late winter, as the flowers are starting to show, simply remove all the leaves (and here's a handy hint - do it carefully as it is easy to remove developing flower stalks at the same time.  I tell you this from my own sad, sad experience).  It is a good idea not to compost the leaves as they will harbour leaf spot, pests and other diseases.
• The second type is the one which carries flowers and leaves on the same stalk.  The leaves need to be left until flowering has finished, when the stems can be cut down.  If a plant is badly infected with leaf spot, all the infected stems can be removed in the autumn, but this will lose the flowers for the coming spring.
• The final type includes species such as atrorubens, torquatus and some forms of multifidus, odorus and purpurescens.  These naturally die back to the base at various times of the year, so the dead leaves and debris may simply be cleared away.

All that is then left is to give them a light dressing of a general fertiliser such as blood, fish and bone (but not if you have foxes - use an artificial fertiliser instead).  They can also be mulched after pruning with leaf mould or spent mushroom compost.  Do not use well-rotted manure as it tends to promote leaf growth at the expense of flowers.

If you do have leaf / black spot, spraying with two systemic fungicides alternately is a good idea.  Spray twice in autumn and then twice again in early spring when the new shoots are emerging.

Hellebores as cut flowers

In this week's Saturday Telegraph, the sainted goddess Helen Yemm (in her Thorny Problems column) was asked how to transfer cut Hellebore flowers from the garden without them instantly wilting.  This appears to be a problem for most Hellebores, and especially the Oriental hybrids commonly found for sale.  Helen offered three solutions:

• Simply pick only the flower heads, and float them in a wide, shallow bowl of water.
• Heat treat the stems.  This is a technique used by flower arrangers for these and other tricky wilting plants such as euphorbias.  Dip the bottom inch (2.5 cm for our younger readers), of each newly cut stem into hot but not quite boiling water, for about 30 seconds. 
• The third tip came from one of her readers many years ago.  Fill a washing bowl with water, place the cut stem in the water held in your non-dominant hand (ie the left if you are right handed), then crush the stem firmly between the thumb and forefinger about one and a half inches above the cut (again, for our younger readers, 3.5 to 4 cm).  Then cut the stem through the crushed area, while still underwater (that is why you need to crush with your non-dominant hand, so you can wield the scissors with the correct hand and not take off your fingers in the process!).  This apparently removes the airlock which can form and the stems should quickly stiffen.  It can them be transferred to a vase.  Note that it is a good idea to do this as soon as possible after cutting the flowers.