Anyone who has seen a hellebore in a garden understands why these charming flowers have recently surged in popularity to become a sought-after ingredient in bridal bouquets, a must-have perennial in a shady bed, and the darlings of Instagram.
With sweetly nodding heads, moody colors, and their willingness to bloom in winter when everything around them looks like dead sticks, hellebores are fairly perfect. With one exception. They make terrible cut flowers. Notorious for drooping, wilting, sulking, and otherwise behaving terribly, many hellebores last less than 24 hours indoors. This is unacceptable.
Are there ways to help hellebores last longer in a vase? The other day I decided to find out, conducting an experiment with flowers I cut from my own garden. Here’s what I learned.
Photography by Mimi Giboin for Gardenista.
Which hellebores last longest as cut flowers?
The conventional wisdom is that the greatest predictor of a hellebore’s life span is its stage of development at the time you cut it. Many growers and florists say a mature flower—one with a visible seed pod that has dropped its stamens—will last longer.
Can conventional wisdom be trusted? I headed outdoors, where a patch of mixed hellebores bloom in a shady spot near the front door. My plan was to cut both immature and mature specimens of every variety of Helleborus in my garden.
Above: In the garden, hellebores are naturally droopy. This is Helleborus x ballardiae ‘Merlin’, which darkens, as it ages, from dusty rose to purple.
How do you know if a hellebore is mature or immature?
Above: In an immature specimen, a yellow fringe of stamens is surrounded by small, ruffled petals. The large purple “petals” are actually sepals that enclose the petals.
Even after a flower finishes blooming, the sepals will stay on the stalk and continue to “bloom,” which is why hellebores are prized for having a long season of color.
Above: In a mature hellebore, you can see the seed pod has formed (top); the petals and all but a few stamens already have dropped.
Above: I cut the flowers at the base of the plant.
Will some Helleborus cultivars last longer?
To try to answer that question, I cut as many different cultivars of hellebores as were blooming.
Above: In addition to purple ‘Merlin’, I cut Helleborus foetidus, with chartreuse clusters of cupped flowers; Helleborus x hybridus ‘Ivory Prince’, with pink buds that open into creamy white blooms, and pastel-colored Helleborus x ericsmithii ‘Candy Love’.
Above: A volunteer, in the name of science.
A note about hellebores: There are nearly two dozen species—and of those, many cultivars—and I wish I had more types growing in my garden. I want them all, really. There are double-flowered hellebores, for instance, unspeakably beautiful, which I might want most. There are speckled hellebores and striped hellebores and white hellebores delicately edged in purple.
But my tests were limited to a small selection in my garden—all cultivars commonly sold in northern California. For a world-class collection (including 82 of its own hybrids), browse Ashwood Nurseries in the United Kingdom. In the US, Virginia-based Pine Knot Farms has a large selection of hellebores.
Above: Just picked.
How do you condition cut flowers?
After I took the cut flowers indoors, the next step was to prepare them for their new home: vases.
Before florists arrange flowers, they condition the plant material. The general rules for conditioning are (1) strip leaves off the bottom two-thirds of a stem (so you don’t have errant leaves rotting underwater in a vase); (2) make a fresh, angled cut at the bottom of each stem to make it easier for flowers to drink water, and (3) leave flowers in a cool, dark place (in clean water) for a few hours or overnight to acclimatize them.
For special cases—and hellebores fall into this category—there is lots of advice about extra steps one could take before arranging them. Some florists stick pins in their stems. Others swear by the boiling water method, in which each stem is dipped into a hot pot for 30 seconds to “seal” it. Still others recommend a further step to take; after dipping them in water “slit them carefully right up their length, almost to the flower head at the top,” suggests UK-based gardening writer Robin Fox Lane. “Then, stand the slit stems in cold water right up to the flower and leave them overnight.”
I guess I could do all that. Once. But I am hoping to regularly bring hellebores inside to arrange as cut flowers, without having to dedicate hours to fussing with them. So I followed general guidelines but skipped the boiling and the slitting.
Above: I gave the flower stems a fresh, angled cut after we brought them indoors.
What tips are there to make hellebores last longer?
First, to summarize the variables for this experiment:
- I cut both immature and mature flowers to compare their staying power.
- I cut a variety of cultivars.
- I followed general guidelines for conditioning flowers but skipped the extra steps (no boiling water, no slit stems).
And I discovered…
Above: Hellebores in clean vases of cool water.
The hellebore that lasted the longest in a vase was ‘Merlin’. The deeper the shade of purple, the longer it lasted.
Above: My purple hellebores in all stages of maturity had staying power, lasting from five to seven days in vases.
Above: With the other cultivars, it didn’t seem to matter if they were mature or immature flowers; by the next day they were droopy and spent. Even their foliage looked wilted.
Above: The winner is… ‘Merlin’, still blooming happily a week later.
In this instance, the specific cultivar was a better predictor of longevity than the stage of development of the flowers. Would this be true across the board if I could test every hellebore in the world? I only wish I could.
To see more hellebores in action, see our Garden Design 101 guide to Hellebores. And browse our archives:
- Gardening 101: Hellebore.
- 5 Favorites: Hardworking Hellebores that Bloom in the Snow.
- DIY: Seasonal Bouquet for Valentine’s Day.
Finally, get more ideas on how to successfully plant, grow, and care for hellebore with our Hellebore: A Field Guide.
Finally, get more ideas on how to plant, grow, and care for various perennial plants with our Perennials: A Field Guide.