Above: Naturalized hellebores mingle with daffodils on the banks of a vernal stream alongside the driveway at Marietta and Ernie O’Byrne’s Eugene property. Below: Marietta and Ernie O’Byrne opened the Northwest Garden Nursery in 1992.

Gardener’s fall prey to plant lust with alarming regularity. I always laugh when asked to name the plants on my Top 10 hit parade. My stock reply is: “I have a different favorite every day.” Truth be told, one seductive genus is my all-time No. 1: helleborus. The species forms have their own allure, but it is the hybrids that hold me in thrall. Helleborus x hybridus are the jewels of the winter garden. 

The plants are evergreen, hardy and shade tolerant with handsome, durable foliage; they bloom from January through April. Those are great attributes for any plant, but it’s the flowers that make me swoon. The newer hybrids offer a luscious array of colors and flower forms. Blooms in shades of jade green, amethyst, bubblegum pink, dusky maroon, blushing apricot, onyx, pristine white and butter yellow abound.

Before the renaissance in hellebore breeding, flowers were single, composed of five sepals that look like petals. Now double-flowered hellebores are de rigueur for shade-garden connoisseurs, as are semi-doubles. The sepals of many of the new hybrids look as if they have been enhanced by an artist’s brush overlaid with color, the subtle addition of a picotee edge or splashed with contrasting colored freckles.

Gardeners the world over have Eugene nursery owners Marietta and Ernie O’Byrne to thank for their role in creating this new generation of plants. In 1992, after 17 years as landscape gardeners in Eugene, the O’Byrnes opened Northwest Garden Nursery, specializing in hard-to-find and unusual plants not readily available in the trade. Their cachet as purveyors of exceptional plants grew as they traveled to regional plant sales and as more and more gardeners made the trip to visit their nursery and exquisite garden. Like other savvy gardeners, the O’Byrnes used hellebores to great effect as reliable, low maintenance evergreens in their shade gardens. They appreciated their precocious late winter, early spring bloom season and the longevity of the flowers which provide a bridge between the winter and spring garden. But the blooms, mostly white, pale pink and muddy shades of burgundy were not as colorful as other vernal beauties like daffodils.