Hellebores, Part IV (page 2)
Deep Purples - Slatey Blues - Midnight Blacks
These dusky colors are probably the most sought after, likely because so few plants exhibit this range of color. While exquisite on close examination, they need careful placing in the garden so that the color doesn't fade into the shadows.
Graham
tells me he has this one in a bed underplanted with snowdrops (Galanthus)
- sounds the perfect combination to me. This one has me salivating
because the foliage is purple, echoing the tints in the slate blue
flowers. It came from a hybrid given Graham by a friend fifteen
years ago - a chance cross with a good form of H. torquatus. His
friend's plant had dark red flowers. Graham did four crosses over
a twelve year period to get this one plant; the only one with this
color from a batch of eighty seedlings. He says he's "selfed" it
(hand pollinating with the plant's own pollen), but hasn't been
able to duplicate the dark foliage.
It seems that these lovely dark colors can be due to recessive genes. Graham says that "recessive genes do occur in pure species - following Darwin's theories they would die out in the wild. We select them for hybridizing because they are different. This is particularly true of the blacks. Many of the dark forms of H torquatus collected in the wild have been found to have recessive genes (e.g. H. torquatus 'Nero') and they have been used to breed in dark colours, but not all dark coloured forms have recessive genes. It is just a case of finding out by trial and error which do and which don't."
