Our roses are blooming - just. This autumn's rain and warmth has encouraged the bushes to give us one or two blooms each, a Souvenir de la Malmaison giving its fragrant pinkness by my study, a Buff Beauty wafting scent into the dining room, and the tiny red rose whose name I forgot to note that is flowering over the chook house. The one rose that usually blooms all through winter in our garden - though never as prolifically as it will in spring and summer - is Climbing Iceberg, especially as it's planted against a sunny stone wall. We also have the vivid lime green Iceberg leaves all winter too.
Sadly, our Climbing Iceberg rose is currently being guzzled by Possum X and his missus on their way down to the cumquat tree, so we have no flowers from it. There are other roses that will give blooms in winter: David Austin's Mayflower, gloriously fragrant, and Mutabilis with its butterfly-like single blooms, and most of the "landscaping" roses that have been bred to survive and spread across the dry gravel of street roundabouts or along highways will bloom most of the year, though that is partly a case of "location location", i.e. no shade whatsoever and extra light and heat reflected from the road and gravel.
But the real "winter roses" are hellebores, who gained their name from reliably producing flowers all through the cold months. I once despised hellebores. The leaves become mite-eaten and splodged in summer, and the flowers used to come in shades of grey-green which only looked good when picked and arranged with an elegance I can't aspire to. But breeders were already at work.
Now those once insignificant grey blossoms come in hundreds of shades of red to gaudy pink, orange, purple or vibrant gold, posted, striped, freckled, single double, and "double double". The flowers are held well above the leaves, so make a stunning display when little else is blooming except the annuals we all should have planted by now for winter cheeriness, but probably haven't. And of course camelias, wintersweet, grevilleas and much else - but none are quite as ridiculously trouble-free as hellebores.
First of all you plant them, then enjoy the blooms; then when the colour has faded, mow over the leaves - or snip them off if they are in a garden hedge that can't be reached by the lawnmower. If the original plant was sturdy, then you will get new bright green and blemish-free leaves springing up in late summer/early autumn. If the plant was just a tiny seedling, hold off on the severe pruning for a year or so until it's old enough to give a good display of blooms - though with good feeding and watering you may (just) get flowers the first year. Once it blooms, your hellebore will be hardy enough to flourish with hard cutting back.
Hellebores grow anywhere in the garden in our climate, including one seedling that has sprung up in the middle of our steps and gives such pretty flowers I can't bear to get rid of it. Plant your hellebores in deep shade, dry shade, full sun in the flower garden or under the roses, or in dappled shade in the grass under fruit trees, and they will survive and thrive. I like the "dappled shade in the grass under fruit trees" best, as that way the hellebores are easily mown in summer, but give a wonderful spread of colour when the trees above them are bare.
The one major problem with growing hellebores is that they have become so gorgeous, so much a Cinderella finally showing her flamboyant skirts, that they can be very hard to find from now until they begin to look boring in summer. Cunning and well-organised gardeners buy bare-rooted plants early. If you see hellebores for sale, grab them and run (pay for them first).
You can also plant hellebore seeds, though they won't come true to type - hellebores flagrantly interbreed and also revert to looking like their ancestors. I've found that the first generations of seedlings tend to the "slate greyish-green" look, but their seedlings then become multi-petalled white, or purple with white stripes, or frilled red dotted with pink.
The seeds won't be ready until spring, but while the cheaper, bare-rooted small plants have mostly sold out, any week now potted hellebores in full splendiferous bloom will be in the nurseries. Be adventurous - even if you like a tasteful all-white blooming garden in summer, a mass of purple or red hellebore with white streaks or ridiculous white spots and frills will give you something to grin at all through winter and into spring.
There are few blooms as generous, especially to gardeners who lack green thumbs.
This week I am:
- Weeding, weeding, weeding all the soft new weeds coaxed up by recent rain, and possibly mulching over them as well, though that will cool the soil around the seedlings, and I want to coax them into growing fast;
- Feeding the seedlings, so they (hopefully) will keep growing fast in the "autumn flush" of new growth before winter digs its toes in;
- Watching the trunk of an elm tree we had cut down sprout a hundred or so shoots, turning a tall tree into a short, wonderfully shaggy round bush. I think I'll wait until it loses its autumn leaves and prune it back, and see if I can keep it bush-like;
- Eating Kei apples, which look like yellow plums but aren't even a distant cousin, and which fruit spasmodically but utterly reliably from spring through to late autumn every single year, from cool and misty weather to bushfire summers;
- Hoping - maybe, possibly - to finish planting the garlic (I should not have ordered so many varieties to trial);
- Filling vases with the golden and deep blue spires of autumn blooming sage, just coming into full beauty.
