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This is the fork in the road with hellebores and everything else follows from it. If you want more of one particular plant, with the same color and the same markings, the only route is division. If you simply want more hellebores and are happy to take what comes, seed will give you far more plants for far less effort, and the plant will do most of the work itself.
The reason seedlings do not come true is that hellebores cross freely. A garden plant is pollinated by bees carrying pollen from whatever else is flowering nearby, so its seed carries a mixture of parentage. The offspring are usually paler and muddier than the parent, occasionally as good, very occasionally better. What they will not be is the same plant.
Wear gloves for all of this. The sap irritates skin, and dividing a clump means cutting through a mass of fleshy roots and stems with your hands in the middle of it. Long sleeves are worth it too if you are working through several plants.
Division: the only way to get the same plant again
Divide in early autumn, once the weather has cooled and while there is still enough of the season left for the pieces to root in before winter. Straight after flowering is the second-best window. Do not divide in the heat of summer, and do not divide a plant that is about to flower, because you will lose the display and stress the plant at its worst moment.
Hellebores resent division and take a year or two to recover fully, so do it for a reason: to propagate a plant you particularly want more of, or to rejuvenate an old congested clump with a bare, woody middle. A clump that is flowering well and steadily increasing should be left alone. Expect a divided piece to flower sparsely in its first winter and properly in its second.
The shrubby, upright kinds are the exception and do not divide at all, because they grow from a single crown rather than a spreading one. For those, seed is the only practical route, and they self-sow reliably enough that this is rarely a problem.
- Water the plant a day before A clump lifted from moist soil holds together and the roots are less brittle. Lifting from dry ground snaps far more roots than it needs to.
- Lift the whole clump with a fork Work right round the plant, a good spade's width out from the leaves, and lever the whole root mass up in one piece. The roots go out further than you expect, so start wide.
- Wash the soil off the crown Hose or dunk the root mass so you can actually see the crown, the buds and where the natural divisions lie. Cutting blind through a ball of soil is how good buds get destroyed.
- Cut into pieces with buds and roots on each Use a clean sharp knife. Each division needs at least two or three fat growth buds and a decent share of the fleshy roots. Pieces smaller than about a fist take years to amount to anything.
- Trim away the dead middle and any rot Old clumps have a woody, spent center with no buds on it. Cut it out and discard it, along with any soft brown roots, and keep only the firm outer growth.
- Replant at the same depth, straight away Get the pieces back in the ground or into pots immediately, with the crown level with the surface, never buried. Water in well, and shade them for a couple of weeks if the weather is still warm.
- Leave them alone for a full year Do not feed heavily and do not divide again. Remove the flower stems in the first winter if the piece is small, so the plant puts everything into rebuilding roots.
Seed: easy, generous and completely unpredictable
A mature hellebore produces a lot of seed. The pods swell in the center of the faded flower, ripen through spring, and then split open along one seam and scatter. Left to itself, the plant carpets the ground around it with seedlings the following winter and spring, and that self-sown drift is one of the best things hellebores do in a shady border.
If you want to control it, collect the seed rather than letting it fall. Watch the pods as they turn from green to pale straw and begin to gape, and either cut the whole head then or tie a paper bag over it a few days before to catch the seed. The single most important thing about hellebore seed is that it must be sown fresh: seed sown as soon as it is collected germinates well, and seed stored in a packet until the following autumn germinates erratically or not at all.
Sow fresh seed thinly in pots of gritty seed-starting mix, cover with a quarter inch (5 mm) of grit, and stand the pots outside in a shaded, sheltered place. The seed needs a warm period followed by a cold one to break dormancy, which happens naturally if the pots sit outdoors through summer and winter. Germination usually comes in late winter or early spring. Do not throw a pot away that has not germinated after one season, because a proportion often comes up in the second year.
| Method | When to do it | Time to a flowering plant | Comes true to the parent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Division of a clump | Early autumn, or straight after flowering | Sparse flowers in year one, full display in year two | Yes, an exact copy |
| Seed sown fresh in pots | As soon as the pods split | Two to three years from germination | No, seedlings vary widely |
| Self-sown seedlings lifted from the border | Lift at the first true leaf | Two to three years from germination | No, and parentage is unknown |
| Stored seed sown the following autumn | Not recommended | Erratic, often a further year | No, and germination is poor |
Growing seedlings on without losing them
Seedlings move well while they are tiny and badly once they are not. The moment to act is when the first true leaf has appeared alongside the pair of rounded seed leaves. Lift each one with a spoon or an old kitchen fork, keeping a plug of compost round the roots, and pot it individually into a deep pot rather than a wide one, since the roots go down before they go out.
Keep the pots outdoors in a shaded, sheltered spot, water so they never dry out completely, and start a weak liquid feed once they are growing away. Pot up as the roots fill each pot, always into something deeper than it is wide. Slugs will take a whole tray of seedlings in a night, so keep the pots up off the ground and check them.
Line them out in a spare piece of ground for their second year if you have space, since they build faster in open soil than in a pot. Expect the first flowers in the second or third year, and do not give any seedling a permanent position until you have seen it flower. A hellebore looks the same in leaf whether the flower is going to be a good clear color or a muddy disappointment.
Do not compost self-sown seedlings that come up inside the parent clump. Pull them out while they are small; left in place they compete directly with the crown you want to keep, and after two years they are impossible to separate from it.
Records that turn guesswork into a method
Label every batch with the plant the seed came from and the date you collected it, and keep that label with the pot for the two or three years until the seedlings flower. When they do, you will learn which of your plants produces good offspring, and that is knowledge you cannot get any other way because the seedlings take so long to reveal themselves.
For divisions, note the date, which plant you split, how many pieces you got, and how each piece performed in its first and second winters. Two or three seasons of that tells you the size of piece that is worth keeping in your own conditions, and whether early autumn or after flowering works better in your garden. Also record where each division was planted, since a young hellebore is almost invisible in the weeks after the old leaves come off.