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Bigger & Bolder – the Tasmanian Elizabethtown Hybrids
Raised at Frogswell by my predecessor Jane and myself, from seed sourced from the collection of John Bradley, the Tasmanian breeder. These dramatic plants are no longer in commercial propagation.
Y 
semi-double dark red
Orchard Path, February 23rd
The last of the orchard hellebore areas to be planted, focussing mainly on lighter colours – pale pinks, cream-yellows and picotee-edged whites. Most plants are now five or six years old, and producing dozens of blooms
Coping with the Cold
The scene in the orchard on Brigit’s day… Feb 1st. Flowering was at its peak at the end of January, but the predicted cold weather put paid to plans for an early viewing day.
The dramatic collapse of the flowering plants is not terminal; despite their Mediterranean origins hybrid hellebores are actually very hardy. (Down to USDA Hardiness Zone 4, so plants may just be accommodating the current polar vortex).
Their ancestral species are typically found at high altitudes, exposed to late snowfall, and the defence mechanism evolved there has been inherited by the garden hybrids.
As the ambient temperature climbs above freezing, the stems gradually uncurl. Or in a long cold spell, the plants just stay hunkered down.
The longer-stemmed green-flowered hellebore species which come from less extreme climates, lack this adaptation. Frogswell’s thriving stock of the apple-green helleborus sternii, for example, was completely knocked out by the long freeze of 2010-2011.
Earliest of the Slates
Quiet and subtle: low- growing, with down-facing blooms in a subtle grey-blue-purple, but immensely floriferous and reliable and the earliest of all the slates to flower.
It came from Adtian at Southease Hellebores in Sussex, who was breeding dark strains at the time.
One of of my first – and only – batch of bought-in hellebores. It soon became apparent that there was a wealth of forms and colours to be evaluated and worked on, among ypung plants and established clumps, and that introducing more potential breeding material would just be a distraction.
Greeting the New Year
In full flower on Jan 1st, a reliably early yellow of unknown lineage that came with the garden.
The outward facing blooms show off striking dark maroon centres.
It’s known prosaically as W[ood] E[dge] 9. In those early days the flowering clumps were few enough to have ndividual database entries.
Frogswell 