Hellebores (and Something Else) Galore!

Maroon with freckles, double

A week ago, on a Sunday, my garden club and I went abroad to visit a nursery. We went to St. Nicolaas in Belgium ;-) to visit a Hellebores nursery. If you have been paying any attention at all, then you know that Hellebores are one of my favourite plants and it's not difficult to figure out why, is it?
Double green

What's not to like? The plant has beautiful leaves and is more or less evergreen. It flowers for a long period of time (months) in Winter and early Spring when not a lot else is in flower. And speaking of flowers, Hellebores come in so many colours, single or double and with or without spots. Just have a look!
Double yellow
Single white with a crimson eye
Apricot
Pure white
Black!!!
Double pink
Double cream with maroon spots
Pink
Single yellow with maroon eye
At the nursery there was also a show garden where we could look at all the gorgeous Hellebores and how well they do outside in the wild, so to speak, and to what size they grow. We got a guided tour by the owner of the nursery who told us a lot about how to grow Hellebores successfully. They grow the Orientals, which are healthy and strong plants. In December they remove all the leaves of the plants as Hellebores can be sensitive to black fungus. An added bonus is that without the leaves, the flowers are more noticeable. You should leave at least 75 to 100 centimeter of space between two Hellebores to keep both plants happy and healthy.
Here's another pic of those lovely yellow Hellebores. The picture doesn't do it justice because it really was a beautiful light yellow, not cream.
The black Hellebores were almost true black, some where a very, very deep purple, others a sort of very deep grey. Here's one combined with snowdrops, a wonderful combination.
This is a combination of the biggest snowdrops (Galanthus nivalis S. Arnott) and double white Hellebore. We enjoyed ourselves a lot as it was such a nice and sunny day and we were surrounded by many gorgeous flowers. There were a lot of plants for sale and who can resist buying lovely early spring flowering plants? Not I, that's for sure. Now you might be thinking that I bought a few Hellebores, as they are one of my favourites. But no, I'd already bought a few, well OK, I bought 5 Hellebores a couple of weeks ago, so this time I bought these

gorgeous winter aconites. Here they are the first to flower in the garden, even earlier than the snowdrop. They cost 1.50 euro ( 2.25 USD/CAD) a pot (10 bulbs) at the nursery. This is a new kind of winter aconite, its bulbs can withstand drought much better, which makes it easier for bulb growers to grow and sell them as the bulbs won't dry out so quickly and shrivel up and die. I'm going to plant them underneath my apple tree, together with some snowdrops. Hopefully they will spread and will look like this after a few years!
Words fail me to sing the praises of the winter aconite (Eranthis) so I'll let dear Beverley Nichols do that for me and so eloquently too:

It is not 'one of the first spring flowers.' It is a mid-winter flower. It is not 'effective'. It is dazzling. And, from my experience, it would come up if you planted it on a iceberg. I'm sorry to get so hot about the winter aconite, but I hate to see these lovely things neglected. I hate to think of all the bare gloomy spaces in English and American gardens, in mid-January, when they might all be made as gay as a buttercup field.
A buttercup field in mid-January! That is what the aconites will do for you, if you buy enough of them. For the aconite is like a large, brilliant buttercup with a green ruff around its neck, and nothing will stop it from flowering. Its brave gold is untarnished by rain, by snow, by the fiercest degrees of frost. I once planted some aconites in low ground under trees. Shortly after Christmas the ground was flooded. Then came the frost, and a thick sheet of ice covered the whole area. Yet the aconites pushed their way through the earth, expanded their blossoms, and gleamed underneath the ice, like a Victorian posy under a glass dome. They are particularly lovely when there are a few inches of snow on the ground. Their stems are just tall enough to lift the blossoms above the white coverlet. The effect is of gold-spangled satin. But they are lovely too on the mild days, for then they open very wide, and one sees how essentially innocent and childlike they are, which makes their courage and endurance all the more remarkable.
From Down the Garden Path by Beverley Nichols

If that will not get you out of your chair and off to a nursery or garden centre to buy zillions of winter aconites then I don't know what will. But that's enough of you Beverley, off you go, what were you thinking of, waxing lyrically about aconites on a blog about Hellebores? :-)

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I'm feeling a bit better today, but am still very tired. It's not easy coping with both a viral and a bacterial infection at the same time. Thanks for all the kind words, healing thoughts and best wishes. They do help! :-)


copyright 2008 Y.E.W. Heuzen

Decidedly Droopy

A very short blog today as I'm not feeling all that good. My neck and shoulders are much better (rest works) but I have an infection in my lower jaw, an infection in my right ear and I've got a fever, am feeling rather dizzy plus I am in a lot of pain. I am on antibiotics and painkillers although the last ones never work all that well for me. :-(
Thanks for all the kind words you all send me and the concern so many showed for my well being, I appreciate it.
Hopefully, I'll soon feel as cheerful again as those pretty winter aconites!

copyright 2008 Y.E.W. Heuzen

Uh Oh!

This is what my garden looked like early this morning. We had night frost of about - 6 C (21 F) last night and this is the result.
Gaaaaaaaa, just look at my poor greenpointed snowdrops, they looked like this (below), before the frost and how sad they look now, prostrate on the earth.
The fennel in my potager is feeling decidedly very sorry for itself too,
and so is the Bergenia.
The Periwinkle has folded up its flower leaves,
and my poor daisies are not feeling like happy bunnies right now! Brrrrrrr
My poor Hellebore is doing the droopy thing too.
This is always a worry when you get such mild temperatures in January and early February and the garden wakes up. Many a bloom or bud is tender and visits from the Ice Queen during the day and/or night are still very common in the early months of the year and can do a lot of damage in the garden. It is usually around half May that the danger of (light) night frost is gone in my part of the Netherlands.
Fortunately, a lot of the bulbs can stand a bit of frost and before you know it,both the daffodils and the grape hyacinths will look their cheerful self again.
These little dafs were enjoying the early sunshine this morning and were feeling much better than their cousins still in the clutches of the Ice Queen who reigned in the shade.

But it is not only the plants I have to worry about. I noticed that the rainwater in my watering can has frozen too. It is not a solid block of ice yet, which is a relief as I had forgotten to empty it out last night. I'll just put the watering can in my conservatory where the ice can do the melty thing. I don't want my can to spring a leak by letting the water get frozen from top to bottom, as it would be totally useless then.

It was not only the outside garden that provided me with some uh oh moments this morning, inside I found a nasty surprise too.
Argh! Whitefly on my little lime tree in the conservatory, this is not of the good!
I don't want to lose those limes, nor the blossom and it doesn't bear thinking about losing the whole lime tree. So off it went, straight into the
bathroom for a good clean in the bath.
Tralaaaaaa, here it's having a shower and look how
squeeky clean it is once again and all those nasty whiteflies are gone. Well, for the moment they are. This probably means that my lime tree will need a shower once a week until it's May and it can go outside. Once it's outside, the natural predators will soon sort the whitefly out.

I think I'll have to lie down now. ;-)

BTW my neck and shoulder are feeling much better today as I didn't do a lot of blogging this weekend which was just what the doctor ordered. I hope/think you guys will understand that my not visiting and commenting doesn't mean that I don't like your blogs anymore, but that I was and still am physically unable to visit and comment as much as I would like to. Pain is not fun.

copyright 2008 Y.E.W. Heuzen

February Blooms for GBBD

When I announced that the GBBD post (an idea of Carol of May Dreams Gardens) of last January would be my last one, it seemed to disappoint so many garden bloggers, that I've decided to do a few more. Yes, I'm a great big softy but you knew that, right? But I won't do another whole year, as the GBBD posts from May til October take me about 4 hours to make. And 4 hours per post is a bit much, don't you think?
It takes me that long because I have so many blooms during those months that all have to be photographed, their names written down on long lists, then I have to look up their common name in English as I'm Dutch and therefore I am more familiar with the common names for plants in Dutch, not English. Because I've watched the British gardening programme Gardener's World, I am familiar with quite a few common plant names in English, but that is British English, not American or Canadian or Australian English. During last year I've found that the common names for plants are not always the same in America, Britain, Canadia or even Australia and that means that my best bet to avoid confusion about which plant it is, is to write down all the botanical names of the plants. I know quite a few of those as I've been gardening for quite a few years, but not all and as I like to spell them right too, that means more looking up which is time consuming.
Then I have to get the pics from my camera onto my pc, make them smaller (another rather time consuming process), load them up on Blogger (takes quite some time too), write the text and then ................ TADAAAA, suddenly 4 hours later, my post for GBBD is done. So I hope you will understand why I won't do those posts anymore this year.
Since last Tuesday I've been having a lot of pain both in my neck and right shoulder which makes blogging and commenting a bit painful so I've decided to go easy on myself this time and make it a short bloom post, well, short-ish. ;-) So I will only show you what is in bloom outside.

So far you've seen:
- 3 Hellebores in flower
- Winter Aconites
But I have also in flower:
purple Crocuses and
yellow ones and
white ones.
There is also
lungwort in flower,
and Skimmia,
Grape Hyacinths,
Bergenia,
Violets in blue,
yellow,
burgundy and white.

Adding a lovely scent to the winter garden is
Sarcococca or christmas box. The plant itself is nothing to write home about but it's scent is great! The pic is not as good as I had hoped, sometimes my camera's autofocus is not really doing its job properly.

Something about which I'm very happy, is that my daffodils are out already. I took this pic last week, now more flowers have opened.
I'm nuts about dafs, no other flower says Spring to me more than the daffodils do. Such cheerful flowers too!

Still in flower is the
hanging rosemary,
the winter Jasmine,
Periwinkle or vinca minor and
my Camellia. In this pic its in my conservatory as we had some nights with - 5 C frost and I didn't want to get frost damaged flowers.

As I like wildflowers I include them in this GBBD post too and here they are, my darling
daisies!

My pride and joy at the moment, apart from the first daffodils, are the snowdrops. Here's a pic of the special greenpoints,
still a small clump as you can see, but it is only its first year of flowering and I have high hopes that someday it will look something like this;
a clump of ordinary snowdrops, but aren't they simply gorgeous?

My garden has truly woken up and it is not only showing a lot of blooms already, but it is also full of promise of things to come.
Amelanchier forming buds.

The weekend is going to be sunny but cold over here, the Spring weather left us last Wednesday. But as long as the sun is shining I'm not complaining. It's good to see that the days are lengthening and nature is waking up.

Have a great weekend!

copyright 2008: Y.E.W. Heuzen

It is February.
The bulbs are shooting,
the moon is slipping
dripping stars, hot and sticky.
Jane Eaton Hamilton