the older leaves will start looking raggedy, but resist the urge to prune or tidy them, and come late winter, the new leaves will rise from the old ones in the center, and eventually a bloom spike and viola! you're in business. madgardener
years..........................................booger! maddie
Bill
nahhhh he was just assuming again. I'm not drunk, I'm high on Spring........and voles live in fear around Fairy Holler. I have felines that adore capturing them, interrogating them to bloody proportions and then leaving their battered bodies for me to toss into asshole's yard across the shared driveway. felines don't eat voles, poisonious, but loads of fun nevertheless for kitties to learn how to hunt proper. no voles, no chewed roots and the like.........(they also eat worms and such, and I kinda like my worms, they can have all the grubs they can manage to snatch on the run from my cats) maddie
If they're saying 6 months, then that may answer the other question below, about stratification. More research is in order for you. "Seed Starter's Handbook", by Nancy Bubel (sp?). Check your library. I know it sounds bizarre that seeds can take that long to sprout, when you consider that marigolds pop out in about 48 hours. But, the plants have their own reasons for doing things. Sort of like cats.
Perhaps their natural habitat is in deep woods, where shade can exist behind embankments, or around tall evergreens. At home, you can give them some winter protection by banking leaves against them, observing the patterns of light on your property and planting accordingly, or using other plants to provide the necessary conditions.
See above, and take a close look at this site. I suspect it might have some information about hellebores, but I'm not sure:
Here is a plant place
Cricklewood Nursery, 11907 Nevers Road, Snohomish Washington. 98290
Seeds below and btw this post is driving my my spell checker crazy ;))
According to the Book Hellebores ISBD 0-88192-266-8 which costs US 29.95 wow. But the pics alone give a glimpse of what can be. I think of these plants as almost being small scrubs.
Anyway it says Hellebore seed can be imported into the U.S. from Europe.
So we start with a U.S. Source.
Life-Form Replicators PO Box 857 Fowlerville, Michigan 48836
Phedar Nursery Bunkers Hill Romiley, Stockport, SK6 3DS
Jim & Jenny Archibald Bryn Collen Ffostrasol, Llandysul Dyfed SA44 5SB
Last two source are from the United Kingdom.
Bill
How cool. If they spread out that would be great.
They sound like fun.
he doesn't HAVE to grow them from seed. I'm willing to prick out a few seedlings from my three different varieties and send them to him if he absolutely doesn't want to get up off of the $13 for a gallon pot (that's a good price, by the way) but I've not heard back yet. madgardener who knows how to spell Hellebore..........LOL
Speak for your own felines! My daughter's cat catches 2-3 voles/mice per day, and eats them all. Of course she throws them all back up again too... bleh.
I have a couple of young witch hazels in full vole colonies, they seem OK so far. Hadn't heard about voles causing a problem for the roots.
As for the Hellebore subject, they are notoriously difficult to grow from seed, though perhaps not as bad as something like Paperbark maples that need 2 year stratification and have a
1% success rate. Personally, I'd buy established plants.Don't know about growing them in colder zones though. I'm in what passes for 8, and mine took a real beating this winter. They're only just blooming now, usually we have them in january if not earlier.
-E
You might want to wait until the end of the season and see if you can get any on sale. I picked up four last August and paid $10 for the lot. They have beautiful flowers on them right now. I saw an ad in a local nursery's flyer last week advertsing Hellebores 1 for $30 or 2 for $50. Insane pricing!
Good luck finding some. They are worth it if you can get them at a reasonable price!!
Jacqui
The message from Emery Davis contains these words:
One of our cats, working at a slightly faster rate, has caught and eaten (roughly) fifteen thousand voles in her lifetime. She surgically excises the liver and some other small vole organ (without breaking or damaging them) and leaves them on the floor. She's never sick. I suspect those might be the bits that less skillful cats can't eat or digest.
Our other cat, the world's laziest feline, has never caught anything in her entire life. At age 16 she still has perfect looks, like a kitten.
I have found voles are a pain at girdling bark on witchhazels, hazels, and many young trees. I always used guards until the bark was tough enough not to interest them. Keep grasss away from the stems, otherwise in snowy weather they use the grass as a teepee with food laid on.
Not if you sow them in autumn as soon as the seedpods are ripe and split; then they come up like mustard and cress the next spring. Older hellebore seeds or ones that have dried out in a seed packet are very reluctant to germinate (not worth wasting money buying seed imho).
Janet
Janet
Too bad Home Depot doesn't sell plants like that. You could walk in right now, ask for the manager, and say "Look...you're gonna start killing all your nursery stock in about a month, and then try to sell it all really cheap. Why not just sell me some of those plants now, at the damaged goods price?" :-)
Here in Australia, I sometimes see them at second hand type shops. People often end up with so many of them, they give them to these places to get rid of them.
Jen
But once you have one or two plants, you're set, at least with some hellebores. Last year after the seeds on my Helleborus foetidus ripened, I laid the flower stalk on the ground and brushed a few leaves after it. Two of them, actually. Now I have two sets of about 30 - 40 seedlings.
Here in 6b they've been in bloom since February. OK, so the year before the H. foetidus bloomed in November! Anyway, most hellebores are hardy to zones
4 or 5.
Interesting, I've never seen mine poke up seedlings. I've got 4 nice clumps, established before we bought the house.
I remember someone used to post a nice site to URG, I think, with lots of great pics. Tried googling but didn't turn it up. He/she is/was a big collector of the things and spoke of the difficulties of seed exchange IIRC.
Thanks for the > One of our cats, working at a slightly faster rate, has caught and
Our Lucy is less scientific, which is to say she loses her mind when confronted by raw flesh, or the chance at it, and once the prey stops moving she ingests.
Very useful in the garden, she more than makes up for the damage she does in "crazy mode." (Or at least has so far, hehe.) My main complaint is the size of her range: she seems to hunt over several hectares, but invariably throws up the remains near the front step.
[]Not much snow here, or not for long. Anyway I weed and mulch the base of all young shrubs and trees, and I do use a bit of plastic grilling at the base. So hopefully I'll be OK. Thanks for the advice.
-E
I do nothing and they self seed sometimes. Can you speak about laying flower stalks down ? I'd like to help the process as so far it is mystery. Still looking about and identifying plants is fun.
We spend a lot of our time searching here for Japanese Maple gifts. Hellebore's now on our list too.
Thanks!
Bill
"William Wagner" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@sn-indi.vsrv-sjc.supernews.net...
I really have no experience and followed no principles from books or elsewhere, only I knew that the seeds don't travel well and had heard that the plants do reseed right where they are. I don't want a zillion hellebores next to the one where I have it by the front steps, so I tried two places - one there and one elsewhere. I waited till the seed pods sticking out of the middle of the blossoms had turned black and really looked ripe (it was late May, even into June, maybe), and the flowers themselves were looking raggedy and finished. I cut the flower stalks at the base with scissors. One of them I laid on the ground a foot away from the mother plant, and brushed some pine needle mulch up around it. The other one, I took to a different, desirable location at the edge of the woods (oak forest), pushed the previous year's leaves aside and put the flower stalk on the bare ground, then pushed the leaves back up around it. That's all. About three weeks ago the seedlings came up, tons of them. It really looks as if maybe 80% of the seeds on the stalks germinated. They'll have to be thinned, and some of them transplanted, but a few I'll leave in place, because I hear they don't like transplanting, either. I have just about limitless numbers of places for them to go, on an acre and a half of woodland, with a clearing for the house, and paths. ... Just now everything is beautiful with native Cutleaf Toothwort and Claytonia Virginica (Spring Beauty), plus some Virginia Bluebells and Bloodroot that I got started a couple of years ago and they're spreading - and that's even though my efforts to eradicate the invasive Garlic Mustard and Japanese Honeysuckle from the forest floor are slow and laborious.
Are the seeds good sized or tiny?
Sorry, I'm really not sure. The black things sticking out of the blossom are pretty large, about half an inch long (on H. foetidus), and four of them. But I think they're pods. And don't mess with them unless you know what you're doing, because I believe they can irritate the skin badly if you start cutting them open.
Isn't that subspecies known as stinky hellebore? Do they smell bad? :)
Reminds me of the old Ren and Stimpy cartoons. Steeenky! :)
Thanks a lot for the info! I'll give it a try. I value some Hellebores over others and now have a possible way to go more in that direction. Next on my learning curve will be hand pollination ;)).
Best
Bill
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