San Francisco Botanical Garden - Gardens

There are few plants in the northern hemisphere that choose winter as their time to bloom. Growing from lustrous basal leaves, palmate and often markedly toothed, Hellebores rise on graceful stems to support a shy, buttercup type flower with sepals rather than petals in colors of white, pink, purple, green, even yellow. Their true petals are nectaries, an inner ring of tiny glands containing sugar water and tucked below the many pale stamens, features indicating a primitive plant. Other Hellebores have bell-shaped flowers and deciduous leaves.

In Western Europe, on islands in the Mediterranean, Corsica, Majorca, Sardinia, to the Balkans, Greece, Turkey, and even as far as western China, one can find Hellebores braving frigid nights and dry summers, growing in the dappled shade of forests. A shade plant, Hellebores requires little maintenance and their mounds of leaves rejuvenate as winter approaches and the buds appear, often opening in time for Christmas.

Gertrude Jekyll, an influential British garden designer, writer and artist of the early 20th century wrote that gardeners should use Hellebores "where wood and garden meet...where, placed under deciduous trees, the sun of winter meets the shade of summer."