How to Care for Hellebores - Winter Pruning Tips Video

Hellebores is one of the first plants to bloom in spring and a wonderful, easy care shade loving plant. In this video, our gardening experts talks you through the process of pruning and clean up in order to make your hellebores look their best.

Hi. This is Scott with Spring Hill Nurseries and here we are at the nursery in mid-March. The snow just melted and it's a little early for some people to think about getting out there and gardening. But it's never too early coz we're going to be talking about one of my favorite plants today - Hellebores. If you're a suburban gardener like me, you're always looking for that plant you can grow in the shade because we all have trees in our yard. And if you can find a shade loving plant that can also grow in the early spring, and in the fall when nothing else is blooming, you've got a real winner, and that's hellebores. Let's take a look at the one I've got right here. So, I just came out and like I said, the snow just melted. So, you're looking at this plant and it looks kinda messy. What I'm going to show you today is how to get this looking it's best and blooming for the season to come. So, if you look here, we've got all this foliage that's sort of, you know brownish from the cold weather that we just had. But if you move it away, you can see the blooms. Real nice, and they're trying to show their colors for the beginning spring season. What we're going to do is, we're going to do some bed cleanup. We're going to get rid of everything that doesn't have a bud on and though that might hurt your gardening hard, but I want you to cut anything that does not have a bud. Let's do it. I've been doing this for a while so I don't have any gloves on, but you may want to wear gloves when working with hellebores. The leaves and part of the stem do have some spines on them. So just cut it away, don't worry, it's a perennial, so it'll come back next year. When you get rid of all those that don't have buds on them. And if you see, come in, look here pretty close, you can see we've got some really nice Red Lady hellebores buds here. And they're going to bloom pretty soon. Like I said earlier, they bloom in the early spring, right after the snow melts, before just about anything else, in fact, our bulbs aren't even up yet but these are out. Then they'll come back in late summer-early fall and they can bloom in cold weather. It's now two weeks later here at the nursery and we're looking at the hellebores that we did the early spring cleanup on and look at this plant, it is gorgeous! Look at these blooms! It's a real easy job to take care of your hellebores. Just take out that old dead foliage and this is the result that you get. These flowers will stay on here for a long time. It'll look great out in the garden and also you can cut these flowers, they look great in bouquets and in the house. So that's it, hellebores, easy, beautiful plant. From Spring Hill Nurseries, I'm Scott.