Hellebores
“If you can see dirt…..”
You will know you’re in hell if the hybridizers are forced to room with the taxonomists. Can we humans ever leave well enough alone?
It is ‘cut-back-the-winter-damaged-hellebore-leaves-to-give-the-new– flowers-a-chance’ time. It’s also windy and bite-ly cold; the nose runneth profusely.
Hellebores aka Lenten (sometimes Christmas – different species) roses, which they are not, have been one of the latest targets of hybridizing ‘improvements’. I know no soul–whose core is so cold–it is unattracted to these ‘bravest of all perennials’, whose appearance is in advance of the usual spring ‘surprise’ suspects, who have braved and survived the worst winter could throw at them albeit with tattered and sprawled remnants of battle fatigued foliage.
All of that character and toughness is quickly forgotten in the foray of complaints about not being able to see the flowers. They look down, you see. They do not stare us directly in the face and say ‘you are the most important thing in the universe, this is all about you’. They nod their heads. There is more than one reason for this, I suspect. The most obvious is where they will drop their seeds – right where you think they will. And if you haven’t noticed the abundance of baby hellebores around your plants, you’re not paying attention or are way too fastidious for your own good.
The second reason is, perhaps, less obvious. In order to fully appreciate the flowers, you are going to have to get down on the ground with them and look up close. How else are you going to appreciate many of the other implications of the hybridizers manipulations? There are now as many variations in hellebore flowers as there are parts, each part being selected for ‘playing with’ in order to do something different: huge square nectaries, color variations, fancy edges, and, heaven forefend, double or even triple flowers (which may now be too heavy to look upward even if they had help).
No, that’s actually not what we’re after. We are after seeing the plant up close and personal, down in the dirt, with all the surrounding forms of busy-ness going on, to smell and appreciate the miracle of warming, spring soil and the promise it holds. You are looking at an amazing, awe-inspiring thing, that soil. The result of countless years of being belched from the inner earth, cooled, heated again, cracked, broken, endlessly wind-and-water bombed and mixed with worm poop supports plant life which supports us and which is, as far as we know now, utterly unique in the universe.
If you’re not feeling privileged by now, you should be. So, down on the ground, then look the flowers in the face, be amazed and……smile. You are a part of that.
Head Garden Gnome