A Tapestry Garden by Ernie O'Byrne

Author:Ernie O'Byrne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Timber Press
Published: 2018-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

Helleborus ‘Anna’s Red’.

For the Love of Hellebores

As years passed and our garden grew larger and lovelier with each season, leaving it each morning to landscape the gardens of others in town was more and more difficult. Our hour of departure got later and later. Just a little weeding and pruning before leaving stretched out into hours, until we were arriving in town shortly before noon and were still cleaning up the gardens of our clients as they were sitting down to dinner. Finally, we arrived at a solution: Why not start a nursery? We could raise the plants we loved and needed for landscaping jobs and stay home longer. With the urging and advice of our nursery-owner friend Roger Gossler, we ventured into the retail nursery business. We specialized in more unusual and hard-to-find perennials and shrubs. The retail business expanded for seventeen years until hellebores filled our greenhouses and there was no more room, water, or time to raise other plants for sale. Hellebores took over our life, too. Our business became a hellebore breeding facility and wholesale nursery.

During my early gardening years, I had not been very impressed by the hellebores that were then called Helleborus orientalis and are now called H. ×hybridus. Of sturdy constitution but with undistinguished greenish, muddy-colored flowers, they were usually relegated to the back of woodland gardens and bloomed at the end of winter when no one noticed. How things have changed. Since about 1945, gardeners, especially in England, have been at work developing better color strains by hybridizing about a dozen species of acaulescent species hellebores. We received our first seeds of some of these promising new cultivars from Will McLewin in England and Gisela Schmiemann in Germany in the early 1990s. Soon afterward, The Gardener’s Guide to Growing Hellebores (1993) was published with photos of brightly colored flowers in various hues. We were smitten and intrigued. We were drawn to Europe on a pilgrimage to the best hellebore nurseries, which initiated our addiction to hellebores now in its twenty-fifth year.

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