I nearly missed these beauties during last week’s visit to Harlow Carr. The first is a very neat hybrid with an even coverage of dark purple spots against a lighter background.
The second is a very floriferous cultivar: Helleborus ‘Anna’s Red’. The flowers seemed to have a metallic character in the early evening light.
My final choice for today is sheeny, slate coloured hellebore with dark purple spots – about as close to a black hellebore as I’ve seen this year. A tinge of blue was especially evident on the reverses of the flowers (you can just about make out this patch of plants in the top left of the first image). The foliage was dark green, but the leaves around the flowers were purple. This plant knows how to dress for effect.
I’d expecting that the hellebores would be past their best – how wrong was I?
Realy beautiful !!!
Thank you!
Beautiful shots, all.
I was lucky to find them by taking a small detour on my way out of the garden. 🙂
We need to take advantage of these opportunities.
Lovely pictures. My hellebores are just about still flowering although properly not for much longer.
It’s easy to forget just how long the flowers last.
They are beauties!
I don’t know if Sarah Raven would call these ‘refined, haughty and unusual’ as well as the Erythronium. The top one strikes me as refined, but you’d be hard pressed to find a haughty-looking hellebore.
Nope, not too late here, 15 miles further north of Harlow Carr. We’re good for a week or two yet, I think.
I was expecting the flowers to be on the tatty side by now. Even some of the Christmas ones (Helleborus niger) were still looking nice enough to photograph.
These are such beautiful plants. I look forward to seeing them at the Michigan State University Hidden Lake Garden when I return to Michigan. It will still be about a month before they bloom, I would suspect. Spring comes on slow in Michigan because of the cold wind from over Lake Michigan.
But all the more welcome for that. Does summer weather come on quite quickly after that?
Yes – there have been a few years when we went from winter to summer in just a few days.
What is the pink and blue flower with the spotted leaves in the lower right corner of Anna’s Red?
It’s a pulmonaria (lungwort), but I don’t know the cultivar name.
I love them all, but my heart belongs to the dark ones! 🖤
I can understand that – they were very striking.
Wow they’re very cool. They look almost unreal.
‘Anna’s Red’ looks like something you might see at a crafts fair. I always think “I’ve posted enough for this year”, then I see some more and lose my heart to them too!
Of course you do!