Category: Our Garden

Soon!?

We have had some hellebores (Christmas roses and Lenten roses) in our yard for about seven years.
They bloom during the cold weather, and they are very nice and convenient flowers for a shady yard. (Actually the parts that look like petals are not petals, but calyxes…)
It’s getting to be the season for them, and the first one to bloom is a naturally sprouting H. orientalis! It seems the flowers are greenish pink.

In my experience, hellebores easily make seeds and sprout… However, they are very weak for the summer heat and most sprouts disappear during the summer. And it takes about three years for them to bloom, so they have to survive at least two summers.

In addition, they need some sunshine to grow: we also have a naturally sprouting H. niger (the original white-flowered Christmas rose) but it has never bloomed even after some years.
Although they are originally strong plants when they can survive the summer, even so, some hellebores we bought somehow got a disease or didn’t suit their location and dried up or disappeared. I wonder how many we have lost!

That’s why we feel very happy about the new flowers!
They are the first to bloom in our yard: I guess it’s because they got slightly more sunshine than the other hellebores.

– YS, 8 January 2008

8 January 2008