The idea of the Lenten or Christmas rose, botanically known as a helleborus (insert your own snide reference here to possible derivation of the name from political debate) has always appealed.
How many flowers have the potential to bloom in the winter around here? Of course with the strange pseudo-winter we have had, there was a possibility for a while there that the whole garden could be over this spring by May 24.
Be that as it may, the helleborus is supposed to be one of our earliest plants, with little buds noramlly sticking their heads up through the snow, with the snow drops in late April or early May.
When I bought a set of three expensive hellebores by mail order from a garden centre some distance away a few years ago, they promptly died.
This was undoubtedly due to operator error, as most of my garden blunders are. I planted in fall, which is good for bulbs but not so good for plants that need to establish roots. And I bought from a mail order house which raised plants in a different climate.
Live and spend again.
So I bought three new plants from the ever-reliable Humber Nurseries in Brampton, planted them in the spring, and they have done very nicely in my so-called woodland garden outside the front door of our house. One of the plants, a nice dark red-purple, has bloomed each year and gets bigger and bigger.
The second, which supposedly has blooms of three different colours (am always leery of such apparent miracles) is doing very well but only has sporadic blooms of a single colour.
The third is the heartbreaker. Every fall it puts out small pink and whitish blooms, far too early, it would seem. They droop through the winter, usually underneath the snow, and then.... droop in the spring. One or two try to lift their heads but soon find it too much effort and fade away.
This last fall, there was a particularly large crop of buds and they were bigger. A couple of weeks ago I come home to find — Ta...Da – there is one beautiful big bloom almost fully open. A lovely alabaster with very, very yellow stamens.
The camera batteries were dead, so, alas, there is no photographic evidence.
The blooming hellebore is, of course, why real winter arrived that night. That’s when we had the big storm. The garden gods don’t ever want you to think you might get the upper hand.
The blooms were piled with snow for awhile. Now they are revealed once more, in all their former flaccid glory. They are quite likely defunct for this year.
But for one glorious fleeting moment, there was summer in January and it was grand.