Hellebores: why we should weed out all those seedlings.

Many people have Hellebores in their garden - usually the fabulous Oriental Hellebore:

OK not the most glorious of photos, but it's a real photo of a real garden, not something pinched off the internet, which has been filtered, tweaked, sharpened, and generally faked...

Here we have a rather nice cascade of purple ones, Helleborus orientalis, and because this is one of "my" gardens, I have removed the majority of the old leaves, so that we can see the flowers properly.

Not everyone likes to do this: some people prefer to leave the leaves, if you see what I mean. 

But I prefer to remove them, for reasons which have been covered in several other articles - just type "Hellebores" into the Search box, top left - not least being to reduce Hellebore Leaf Spot disease.

Here - right - is a clump of Hellebores in a different garden, and you can see the brown blotches on the older, yellowing leaves.

Pretty unpleasant, aren't they? I really don't see any reason to leave them on the plant: and as for that old wives' tale about "the leaves protect the tender new flowering stems and/or tender new leaves from frost," well, that's simply not the case, because I have been chopping off old leaves in autumn for over twenty years now, and I have yet to see a denuded Hellebore suffering any damage from frost, or snow, or anything else which the British winter can throw at them.

An additional advantage of removing all the old leaves before flowering is that you can see whether or not you have a thick clump of tiny seedlings around the base of the mature plants.

Now, if you read any of those other articles, you will also have learnt that I am in the habit of dead-heading like a demon, once the flowers are over, precisely to prevent the Hellebores from setting seed, and creating those vast numbers of seedlings.

"But surely, this is a good thing?" I hear you ask (Gary, this means you!), "Because then I'll have lots of free Hellebores, and I can pot them up and sell them?"

Alas, they may seed themselves freely, but the seedlings don't "come true", so you are unlikely to get the same desirable colours as they ones which you bought, unless the original ones are all the same colour.. and unless you can prevent any cross-pollination with other colours. Also, it takes between three and five years for seedlings to achieve flowering size. (Sorry, Gary!)

So if you leave them - as anyone with Hellebores in their garden will know - you get a dense clump of seedlings all around the base of the parent plant, like this:

What's wrong with this?

Well, those hungry little seedlings are gobbling up all the goodness from the soil, depriving the adult plant of nutrition: and congestion is never a good thing in a garden, because it leads to mildew and other diseases, especially over the winter.

At the very least, it means you can't see the emerging flowers for the vigorous leaves of the seedling, so it's best to weed the seedlings out as soon as you see them.

The trick is to avoid damaging the parent plant, especially at this time of year when the new flowers are just starting to emerge, so you will need to be careful.

And it's a much easier job if the seedlings are still tiny, as in this photo (above), because they have not yet developed the long, wiry roots which make them hard to remove. Of course, it's even easier if you can weed them out over the summer, before there is any risk of damaging the flower shoots, but let's be honest, there are usually more important jobs to do through the summer, and weeding the Hellebores is one of those jobs which often gets put off until winter.

So there's a nice job for a winter's day: remove the old leaves from your Oriental Hellebores, and while you are at it, winkle out all those tiny little seedlings, carefully and gently: then you can sit back and wait for the flowers!

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