Today was another busy day, despite the weather having turned grey and a tad drizzly. Hamamelis are going well, which is fair enough. They do look very pretty, and choosing your plant when they are all in flower and you can see which you like best seems sensible. Fast growing evergreens for screening were in demand yet again (I can't warm to Photinia x fraseri 'Red Robin'. That's a pity, because it is a useful plant, but there is something soulless about it).
I succumbed to the buying mood, and got myself a Helleborus x sternii Blackthorn Group. It is a plant of rare beauty and I had been lusting after one ever since they arrived last Monday. It would almost be worth growing just for the leaves, which are trifoliate (three leaflets), thick and glossy, with red stalks and huge wonderful teeth around the margins. The flowers are a strange pale green, pale plum on the reverse with a prominent boss of stamens. It holds the RHS Award of Garden Merit. Our label says it would prefer neutral to alkaline soil, so I had better plant it with a dusting of lime. It is a hybrid between H. argutifolius and H. lividus, and according to my Gardener's Guide to growing hellebores by Graham Rice and Elizabeth Strangman should be easy to grow in full sun and seed itself about. I did once have the Boughton Beauty strain of the same hybrid, which did not last with me, but maybe it was in too much shade. At any rate the plant is so beautiful that I'm willing to try again.
Addendum Having marshalled my failing energies to write a post after a day at work, and my mind running on hellebores, I sat down in front of the fire to read more of the hellebores book. The very first photo at the start of chapter one is of H. x sternii 'Boughton Beauty', and I see that while it is lovely the leaves just have plain margins and not the fabulous teeth of the Blackthorn strain.
No comments:
Post a Comment