This year HTA’s Plant of the Month campaign celebrates the best selling plants throughout the months of year, plus the companion plants that complement them in the garden.
Helleborus brings joy to the New Year as HTA’s Plant of the Month for January 2015. Sometimes known as the Christmas or Lenten rose, it is the jewel of the Winter garden flowering reliably from late Winter to early Spring.
Its elegant flowers and attractive leathery leaves will brighten the garden during this cool month, bringing a lift of colour from pale green to white, cream to pink, and purple, to almost black.
Helleborus compromises of approximately 20 species of herbaceous, evergreen, perennial flowering plants. They are often used for decorative purposes and their resistance to frost makes them a popular choice of plant for this time of year. Favourite garden varieties include, Helleborus foetidus, Helleborus niger and Helleborus hybridus.
Best planted in herbaceous borders and in areas between deciduous shrubs and under trees, Helleborus sit beautifully with snowdrops, Primula, and Pulmonaria. Shrubs like, Shrubby Cornusoftengrown for its coloured stems which are brightest in winter, and Mahonia, a popular winter-flowering shrub grown for its bright yellow flowers, are also particularly complementary.
TV gardener David Domoney is the celebrity champion for Helleborus this month. With a keen passion for horticulture, David creates garden designs for the RHS shows, fronts TV programmes such as ‘Love your Garden’ and is the resident garden expert on ITV’s This Morning programme’. He also pioneered ‘Cultivation Street’ a national campaign to bring communities and neighbours together, transforming front gardens and community gardens by improving the place they live in through people, plants and pride.
David said: “Flowering Hellebores make you wonder at the beauty and resilience of nature as they open beautiful flowers in the depth of winter. The diversity of the colour and blooms together with integrated shaped emerald green foliage across many varieties make this a perfect first choice as the calendar year starts”.
Nominated and agreed upon by British growers and retailers, the HTA’s Plant of the Month campaign highlights the plants that are widely available and looking especially good each month.
For more details, please visit www.the-hta.org.uk/plantofthemonth
For high resolution images of David Domoney and Helleborus, please contact the HTA Media Office.
Visit www.daviddomoney.com for more information about David Domoney.
