I wish I could grow them..but if they do grow, they don't flower. I assume due to hotter drier climate. I'll have to just enjoy witch hazel and wait on the hellebores.

If you have any purty hellebores blooming, share them in a thread GG.

No fully blooming Hellebores here yet. But lots of buds.

My hellebores just started unfurling new leaves last week. It'll be a month or maybe two before I see open buds.

The ones that are blooming now are xballardiae hybrids. Helleborus x hybridus - the more common and colorful hybrids - are later bloomers in my garden and have only just started to develop flower buds....still mostly buried :-)

If it stops raining at some point later today, I'll try to get some photos.

dbarron, most of my plants do not produce new foliage until after the flower stalks are produced. I haven't yet trimmed back the old foliage on my xhybridus (the ballardiaes don't get cut back) but I would be very surprised to see any new leaf growth now. Flowers first, then new leaves :-)

Well here the flower stalks on the hybridus are leafy. I see, I was assuming orientalis hybrids in bloom, but still ballardiae would be interesting, I haven't yet decided to acquire any. H. niger is in them and it tends to do poorly here, so I'm a bit unsure.

IME, the xballardiae hybrids are a particularly robust group of plants. Very early and long bloom season, excellent foliage and foliage retention and with little susceptibility to common hellebore issues (aphids, leaf spot, black death, botyrtis, etc.). Hybrid vigor overcomes the weakness of the niger parentage. In fact, the plants released under the Heuger Gold Collection breeding program include several "improved" cultivars of niger that are equally robust and quite disease resistant. I'd recommend giving them a try :-))

Ok GG, you have enabled and *sold*. Bye bye money!

Oddly enough we already have a few signs of life in the snowdrop patch as well, but I don't expect the season here to take off until February at earliest.

Unless of course this warmth continues. If that's the case they'll be up super early, some brutal cold front will come through, and then we will be looking at the calendar for the next 11 months waiting for the next chance at seeing snowdrops... and at that point the hellebores will probably be ruined as well ;)

Don't jinx us...but it happened last year. And setting up to possibly happen this year too. Warm non-winter, then WHAM zero degrees twice, 4 weeks apart in Feb/March.