I've read in various places that x nigercors and x ericsmithii are sterile crosses. I take it that's not always true? Do you know how often they produce fertile seed?

The following is an excerpt from the plant patent application filed on May3,2004 by David Tristram of Walberton Nursery(UK) for Helleborus 'Walhelivor'. Plant Patent # 16,199 was subsequently granted.

"Commencing in 1980, the inventor assembled and hybridized various Helleborus plants and Helleborus seed strains, including selected seedlings of Helleborus niger 'Potter's Wheel' strain, unpatened, which the inventor regarded as having promising characteristics of vigor, form and presentation of flowers. Seedlings resulting from each year's hybridizations were grown to first year flowering, and a select number was retained for second year evaluation. By 1995, the inventor had extracted a collection of promising selections from which 'Walhelivor' was selected in that year as a single plant. The parents of 'Walhelivor' are unknown. 'Walhelivor' is derived from plants which have resulted from the hybridization of plants(seedlings) of Helleborus niger, Helleborus x nigercors, and Helleborus x ericsmithii."

I suppose that answers the question regarding viable seed from from x nigercors & x ericsmithii. I'm going to start looking for them on mine each year!
Rb

Thanks for the information. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on them this year.

Many of the niger hybrids are infertile but certainly not all. Also, another important factor may be which plants are used as seed parent. Most often it has been H. niger, but there has been some experimentation with H. lividus and H. argutifolius and H x sternii as seed parents. Either way, it will be great for horticulture if we can move forward and develop more fertile offspring with these crosses and hopefully move beyond having the market flooded with patented tissue culture plants.

Is there something wrong with tissue cultured plants, patented or otherwise? Yes, they may be a bit pricey but then less common hellebore hybrids tend to be so anyway. And it's one way of ensuring that you get exact genetic clones of named cultivars in a genus that is rather promiscuous in its hybridizing anyway.

gardengal48...

Let us know if you obtain any further info about "Pink Marble'. Could this be another one of Glick's Picks? ala "Sun Marble'.

I believe the advent of micropropogation is very beneficial to the gardening community, as it permits new introductions to be widely available to consumers and generally at a lower price. Helleborus 'Ivory Prince' is now available at my local nursery in flowering size for $6-7, an almost unheard of price for a newly introduced Helleborus and definitly a better bargain than sexually propagated H. hybridus at the same or higher prices, and good luck finding two with identical flowers!

From my point of view (someone who runs a small nursery specialising in hellebores and cyclamen), there is a lot wrong with tissue cultured plants.

Obviously, I can't produce plants in this way, but then I wouldn't want to. I enjoy the growing experience - if I wanted to produce plants using tissue culture techniques, I would have become a scientist, not a nurseryman.

But that's not really my problem. Going to the garden centre shouldn't be like going to the supermarket to buy food. When you go there to buy a tin of beans, you don't inspect the tins, do you? No, you just go to that isle and pick up a tin. Any tin will do, they are all the same. Why would you want the trip to the garden centre to be the same? Benches full of exactly the same thing? No variation?

The Japanese are close to being able to flood the market with tissue cultured/micro-propped H.x hybridus. What a sad day that will be. The variation within H.x hybridus is what makes this group of plants so appealing. It's not a trait to be erased. Of course, there will always be poor plants with muddy coloured flowers around whilst garden centres are selling seed grown stock, but I would rather this than see benches full of the same thing.

And the practice of patenting of these other plants such as 'Ivory Prince' is an almost useless one. It's no more than a marketing ploy to appeal to the buyer. And unfortunately it works, with many buyers cooing over their 'Ivory Prince', as if it's a better plant for having the name. There is nothing at all to stop me carrying out the same cross, producing plants which look like 'Ivory Prince', and either giving them a different name (which I wouldn't do as I don't believe in naming hellebores), or simply giving it no name at all, and just using the x name.

I do hope the 'Pink Marble' isn't just a selection of H. lividus. It gets up my nose when I see selections like this made, and whoever is doing it drops the species name in favour of a 'romantic' one.

The way things are going, I might as well go back to college, become a scientist and invest all my money in a lab.

On a brighter note, it is hellebore season now in the UK, and both hybrids and species are in flower.

Tim, I respect your opinion but there are few issues regarding TC and patented plants I'd like you to consider. Yes, TC is impractical for a great many growers and that is well and good - it is the folks like you that keep breeding and hybridizing or unintentionally discovering a new cross resulting in a wonderful new plant. But sometimes, as in the case of Ivory Prince, typical propagation of the plant is impossible or extremely difficult to achieve on any kind of scale. And if it is truly a very gardenworthy plant appealing to a huge market, TC is a very efficient way of bringing that plant to the public in large quantities. And I hardly think it will result in nurseries and garden centers resembling plant supermarkets with everything the same. With 32 different species, hybrids and named cultivars of hellebores available on my benches, I offer a pretty wide and diverse selection for my customers to choose from.

And I have to disagree with your issues regarding patenting. Breeders devote enormous time and effort into developing new plants with particular features - in the case of Ivory Prince, a very heavily and long blooming plant with upward and outward facing flowers and stunning durable, disease resistant foliage. Their investment in time and money should be compensated. If you do any hybridizing at all you realize how variable the outcome may be - your recipe using the same ingredients may take years to come up with an exact replica, if you ever do. Hybrid tea roses have been patented for years, ensuring that they are propagated under controlled conditions so that the consumer is guaranteed getting a true-to-name variety that offers the exact features they are looking for.

And why shouldn't selected forms of species hellebores be given cultivar names, just as any other plants? Do you not recognize the distinction provided by Potter's Wheel or Wester Flisk or Chedglow (Gold Bullion) or Silver Lace compared to the straight species?

FWIW, I have confirmed that 'Pink Marble' is a selected, named form of lividus with very heavy marbling on the foliage and a decidedly pink cast to the flowers that remains through the season without muddying.

Garden centres in the UK are already looking like plant supermarkets unfortunately. One has to go to specialist nurseries to find anything different, and they are disappearing too. The garden centre a mile away from my house is the largest in the UK, and cost seven million pounds to build. Same lines get sold every season, never anything different. It is a plant supermarket.

My point about the variation in plants is this: you may well carry 32 varieties, but if they all end up being TC plants, there will be very little, or no variation within those individual groups.

If H.x hybridus does end up being mass produced through tissue culture, those doing it will soon learn what sells and what doesn't. The range available will shrink. I like to have a choice as a consumer. What one person overlooks, I might want. I don't want a narrow selection of plants with flowers that are, for example, white, dark violet, yellow, and pink. And then the same again with spots. I want to be able to search through dozens of plants, looking for something that I think is special.

I'm not anti plant patenting. I just don't think it is helpful to anybody in particular. I suppose it gives whoever developed or discovered a plant which they believe to be especially gardenworthy, a false peace of mind. Take 'Pink Marble' as an example - If I have 1000 lividus here, there is a very good chance that a number of those plants would look just like 'Pink Marble'. Obviously that patent doesn't stop me selling those plants. All it does is stop me using that particular name. On a small scale, it doesn't even stop me doing that. Who is there to police it? Calling a plant Helleborus 'Pink Marble' is just bad nomenclature. At the very least it should be H. lividus 'Pink Marble', and I don't like that, either.

There is a very good reason why names shouldn't be given to selections of the species, and that is because they, in most cases (probably all), haven't been propagated by divison, and if that is the case, they are no more than 'strains'. Potter's Wheel is a classic point. The name was given to a single plant originally. But yet we still have thousands of plants in the trade all around the globe carrying the name. Is this right? None of them are divisions of the original. They probably don't even descend from the original. I can go into most colonies of niger I know of in Croatia and Slovenia, and find a few plants which fit the description of 'Potter's Wheel'. Does this mean that these plants are Potter's Wheel? Not to me it doesn't. They are simply niger with large flowers. And yet if I collected those plants and stuck a 'Potter's Wheel' label in them, nobody would know any different. I don't know about in the US, but here in the UK, nearly all niger with a 'Potter's Wheel' label do not have flowers which are any larger than can be found regularly in the wild.

So to answer you question, in the case of Potter's Wheel, no I don't recognise the distinction between that and the straight species because there isn't really any. As for Wester Flisk, Gold Bullion and Silver Lace, yes, I do appreciate that using these names does allow us to be able to have conversations about the plants and all know what the other person is talking about, but the names (leaving aside Wester Flisk) were not given for that reason. They were given to appeal to the buyer.

It looks like we are destined to disagree on most points, but it's an interesting debate nonetheless.

Tim, no problem agreeing to disagree :-) Differing opinions are what makes the plant world go 'round!

And I agree that producing x hybridus by TC would be a huge mistake - this is one hellebore that I believe MUST be selected by individual flower characteristics and uniformity in appearance would ruin them.

And I am distressed to hear that UK nurseries are suffering from the supermarket syndrome. I was always under the impression that yours were the standard we former colonials tried to strive for. I probably add 250 new plants each season to my nursery, and I only buy perennials. But then, I tend not to offer the commonplace anyway - that's what the mass marketers like Home Depot and Walmart in this country are for. I'd rather focus on the less common and more unusual. And of course, any hellebore worth looking at twice (some of them are not).

I hope you guys in the US don't go down the same route as us regarding the way garden centres have become supermarkets. We do have DIY stores which sell plants, but they are nearly always of bad quality. They don't have staff with the specialist knowledge needed to look after 1000's of plants.

The large garden centre I mentioned earlier seems to be what the general public wants. It covers 20 acres and can park 700 cars. They sell pets, fish, clothes, ornaments, organic (and hugely overpriced) food, etc. I wonder how much of their turnover can be attributed to plants? And yet although they sell all these other things, they still maintain that first and foremost, they are a garden centre. There has been a garden centre on the site for many decades, and ironically, it was one of the first garden centres ever to open in the UK. It was family run for most of that time and used to sell some very nice plants - and more or less only plants, none of the other rubbish that they sell now. Then, not so long ago it was bought out by a large group who transformed it into what it is now. The family are still involved in a management role I think.

Most people here just want an easy life - to be able to buy all they want under the same roof. On the whole, they aren't interested in travelling to a small, specialist nursery. It's true that gardening in the UK has become more popular in recent years, but it seems to be 'fashionable'. People just like to have tidy gardens, they aren't particularly interested in the plants they are growing. The number of plant enthusiasts is falling here. Membership of the Alpine Garden Society for example, has been falling steadily for a few years now. So, lots of gardeners, but not so many hardcore enthusiasts.
It's not an easy living running a small nursery in the UK, hence why I have a full time job, and could never rely on the plant side of things to pay my bills.

I'm pleased that we agree about TC H.x hybridus - unfortunately it is going to happen though. For me, there are few things more exciting than seeing a bench full of dozens, or even hundreds of hybrid hellebores, and looking through them, turning flowers up to see if there is anything worth taking home.

Ahh, Tim.....I know what you mean. While x hybridus is not even my favorite of the hellebore offerings, I still can't resist checking them out as they come in in flower, looking for unusual or distintictive spotting or edge marking or an interesting color. Just picked up one out of a "slate" colored seed strain that was a deep, bluish purple but with apple green on the sepals as well - pretty stunning! Looks great with one of the newer forms of wood spurge, Euphorbia amygdaloides, that has very similar foliar coloring.

Being a buyer/manager at a large retail nursery has definite drawbacks - I tend to be one of my own best customers. I'm a sucker for any new, attractive plant that comes down the pike :-)

Ivory Prince may be tissue cultured but that doesn't mean it's available for the mass market (which isn't much in to hellebores anyway). And any small nursery that wants to can get starts of these plants from a wholesaler to grow on and offer to their customers. My small local nursery has made a specialty of this with hostas of which he offers an incredible array of really choice varieties while getting the bulk of his income from a very wide range of annuals and perennials (3,000 varieties the last time I checked).
I got my Ivory Prince from a small local place last summer and think it is a truly great plant - stunning foliage and the upward facing flowers are really showy. Right now it has three shoots loaded with buds and it looks like we'll be frost free for the next week so they should do fine. I've got a small display of hybrid hellebores in shades from white through lavender to plum but Ivory Prince looks to be an entirely different kind of plant.

Old Roser, our Home Depot (Tim, a DIY if you are reading) had flat upon flat of Ivory Prince last week, blooming, $7.97 per gallon...I'd call that mass marketed.

It took a little searching, and speading out of containers all over one aisle while down on my knees, but I did find a few nice plants in the group :)

I was just into one of my local Nursery/gardenshop locations last week. They had 2 benches of plants labeled just as H. X ericsmithii. Still, from the look of them, they were all TC and I think they were 'Ivory Prince' or a very close facsimile. Probably not labeled as such to try and avoid royalty payments. Beautiful plants, in full bloom, but not exactly what I look for in a hellebore.

George

George, Skagit Gardens here in Washington is the only licensed US grower of 'Ivory Prince' - if you see it in local nurseries, it was obtained as a liner from them and grown on to retail size. Royalties have been paid. xericsmithii is a parent of IP so there is a strong resemblance, but I grow and sell both and the flowers of IP are distinctly different. And while it may not be your cup of tea hellebore-wise, it sure appeals to a lot of folks, as I sell more of IP than other hellebore species or hybrid.

I just happened to be looking for something and bumped into this interesting discussion.

A few weeks ago, I went to White Flower Farm and was thrilled to find first year hellebores selling for $3 at their open house. Where I live, that is an unheard of price. That is the only weekend they are available too

WFF is also the only place around here where they have Ivory Prince that I am aware of. They are $21.95 each. This is the only time I have seen any hellebores for sale that were not flowering age. None of them were Ivory Prince though!

I lost several of my hellebores one winter for some reason, so I was happy to replace them this year. I am always surprised at the low prices of some of the hellebores people in other places mention!