Friday Fabulous Flowers - Helloborus hybrids

Thank goodness for gardening.  You've always got something to do when you have a big garden.  Various cultivars and wild flowers are making their spring appearance, more or less right on time based on past flowering data.  Here and there around our gardens are clusters of hellebores, great big buttercup family flowers and they are really tough, but not actually too cold hardy.  TPP can remember seeing hellebores in flower for the first time. And while it was obvious what family they were in, they did not grow in upstate NY so these were new to me.  They are nearly evergreen herbs and are one of the earliest plants to flower, and for some people their greatest value is that bunnies and deer don't find them very palatable.  The plants are slow to get established but once you've got them going, they'll come back for years, and even produce new plants from seed.  The biggest problem is that they do not make good cut flowers and the flowers on the stems are pendant or just plain droopy.  Some of the newer cultivars hold their flowers up better than others such as the ones featured here today (sorry, lost the name if it ever had one).  And it you didn't know this, the flowers lack petals, but the colorful bracts last a long time.

Friday Fabulous Flower - out of sync spring weather & hellebores

Somehow Friday, Sat. & Sunday got away from TPP.  Friday was pretty springy and TPP even planted some parsley seedlings, and luckily put them under some protection.  Saturday was a horrible weather day, starting with sleety rain, that turned to snow, heavy wet snow, and then finally to some substantially heavy snow.  Oh, TPP has seen & experienced much worse, but for this area this was impressive and thankfully brief, but still the storm put a good 6 inches on the ground.  TPP's first thought was swell, this cleanup job can wait a couple of days and warmer weather will remove the snow, but people were coming to din-dins, so sidewalks and drive needed some clearing.  An overwhelmed little snow thrower actually helped move most of the lighter snow that was sitting atop the base of icy slush, that froze once exposed.  Fortunately TPP had some experienced help, a French Canadian guest, who while now living outside the reach of the snow gods, still remembered how to shovel.  Some of the things in bloom will probably have gotten crushed by the heavy precip.  but fully expect the extremely tough hellebores to take this in stride. Although they may be a bit more noddy than usual. One problem with the common hybrid hellebores is that they tend to hold their flowers in a nodding or pendent position and the heavy slush may push them down further.  So here's what hellebores looked like before getting smushed under slush. The cold & snow won't bother them.