Scottish Rock Garden Club Forum
General Subjects => Flowers and Foliage Now => Topic started by: biodiversite on February 13, 2007, 04:14:05 PM
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Hi everybody,
I raise Helleborus dumetorum from Slovenia, far from all over helleborus species. 3 years ago I collected the seeds with a bag around flowers, and I sowed the seeds. The seedlings are flowering, but surprise, the color of the flowers is different.
Here are a photo of the mother plant flower, green, and a photo of the seedlings, white and pink : what do you think ? There was an hybridization (for example with H. orientalis, H. purpurascens or H. atrorubens), or it's the natural variation of the species ?
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Hello, I have been looking closely at your photos and the mother plant does not look like H. dumetorum to me. I have seen H. dumetorum in Slovenia (close to Maribor in the northeast) and at lots of sites in northeast Croatia, and as far as acaulescent hellebores go, it is a fairly homogeneous species.
Whereabouts in Slovenia does your mother plant come from? There are some plants in the southwest of the country which look like a more delicate form of H. odorus, and your plant looks similar to those. The flower on your plant looks too rounded in shape; H. dumetorum flowers are usually more star-shaped, with the sepals not overlapping as much as they are on your flower. The shape of the sepals on your plant was what made me think straight away that it is not an example of H. dumetorum. I have posted some photos below for comparison. These plants are in a colony east of Pakrac, northeast Croatia. I don't like to use the word 'typical' too much when I'm talking about hellebores, but... the flower shapes you see in the photos are typical of classic dumetorum. Another reliable (but not on every plant) and distinguishing characteristic of H. dumetorum is the elegant white rim around the edge of the sepals. Do you have any photos of the foliage?
The plants in your second photo are definitely of hybrid origin. Whether your parent plant from Slovenia is a form of local odorus (likely I think), or an aberrant from of dumetorum (which I doubt), neither of these species show variation to the degree where plants looking like the ones in your photo would appear.
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Thanks very much for your precise answer.
The plant come to me from czech collector, but I don't know the exact locality.
I don't have any photos of the folliage, I only found an ancient and finer photo of the flower of the mother plant, if it can help you.
Now the folliage of the mother plant is cutted as it was dead, but I don't remember such a 'cannabis-like' folliage on my plant, I think folliage is closer than those of H. cyclophyllus...
Do you think my plant so could be a real H. odorus ?
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Yes, your plant looks to me to be closer to H. odorus (or whatever the local, more delicate Slovenian form of odorus will end up being called) than it is to H. dumetorum. I have been looking at your photos again, and the bracts on your plant look far too small for dumetorum. Look how large the bracts are on the plants in my photos. The bracts on plants of H. odorus are much smaller than those found on dumetorum.
It is a shame that you do not have a photos of the foliage. Do you remember seeing tiny hairs on the underside of the new, emerging foliage? Young H. odorus foliage is usually visibly pubescent, whereas the young emerging foliage of H. dumetorum is glabrous. The fact that you say that the foliage looks more like cyclophyllus would suggest to me that you do have odorus. It would be difficult to confuse dumetorum and odorus foliage with one another.
It is a nice plant and I hope that you are not disappointed if it is odorus and not dumetorum. Perhaps you will post photos when the foliage emerges.
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No for me H. odorus is great too as I don't have it in my garden.
Yes I'll try photos of the emerging folliage to have confirmation of the identification. I don't have botanical formation so I don't observe precise characters :-[.
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Great, I look forward to seeing photos of the foliage.
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This is our first post since the start of the new forum format. I guess we are slow adapters.
I will attempt to put up a picture of what we grow here as H dumetorum. It is rock hardy, long lived, not very showy and thankfully only seeds around a bit. It has never appeared to cross polinate. Original seed came from Mclewen.
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When you attach a photo to a post does it show on screen when you preview the post? After you attach the pic is that all you have to do?
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Hello Rob, Nice to have you back. It gets easier I promise.
Yes, unless you want to say something else, just click "post" and it all happens. The image doesn't show in the preview or on the reply screen which is a bit disconcerting at first as you don't know where to write the next line. I just press "return" a couple of times and start to type again if I'm putting text between pictures.
We'll be expecting pics soon of your stunning Cypripediums et al.
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That's a nice photo, Rob, again showing how large the bracts of dumetorum are. I have plants here from Hungary which have that conical flower shape; does your plant have a WM collection number and if so, what is it?
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Thank you for the welcome back, Lesley, and for the usage tips. I really only have time to work with my pictures in the winter, and I will try to post a few in the next few months. I love to photograph our garden and try to do it all each year so I can make a chronological record of how it progresses through the seasons. My overall intention is to have a video slide show for each of the past few years to keep our memories alive in our impending dotage.
Sorry Tim, no notes here on McLewen's collection numbers. There may be a list here somewhere and if it shows up I will let you know.
Attached is a photo of one of our H. niger with flowers that turn dark red/brown as they age. A few other nigers have this colouration but none as extreme as this one. Is it unusual?
-Rob
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That looks like something quite different Rob, a beauty and full of seed as well.
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Lesley, in viewing the picture the colour was not what it should have been. The green was off because of a colour cast which I have now removed. I hope. As I had posted the pic because of the colour I will give it another try.
-Rob
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Hello Rob, that H. niger is fantastic. It's not unusual to see the sepals turn a deep red like that in wild populations. In the UK though, it's not seen all that often (or at least the colour isn't usually that intense) and plants collected in the wild which have deep red sepals at the time of collection often never perform anything like as well in cultivation.
Certainly in Croatia and Slovenia, when niger comes into flower it is often as the snow is melting and this is often followed by many days of bright, unbroken sunshine. It is this intense sunlight which causes the sepals (usually on the pollinated flowers) to turn a deep pink or red. We don't get much weather like that during spring in the UK, at least not where I live, anyway. A few of my plants will show a little bit of colour around the rim of the pollinated flower, but never have I had a completely pink/red flower.
Below are some photos I took at a very nice colony of wild H. niger in Croatia, between Rijeka and Ogulin. You can see that some of the plants have flowers which have turned red after pollination.
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What a delight to see such beautiful plants in their natural habitat! I have never seen this red coloration in my own H. niger plants. Although the spring in Norway is normally very sunny, and with long days, I suppose maybe the sun is not intense enough. Keep the pictures coming, please.
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Rob and Tim, that would be a great trait to fix in H. niger, either bybreeding or selection from the wild or both. Lovely pics above, all of them.
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The colouring of our niger flowers appears just as the stamens begin to fall off. The H. Niger photo 4 below has less colouring than the others and was from McLewen seed. I think he referred to them at the time as the Sunset and Sunrise series. The number 3 photo and the orignal red/brown flower photo I put up come from seed set on our first plant purchased years back.
Seeing Tims photos of nigers growing in the open and not woodland suggests to me we should try them here in more open situations.
If anyone would like fresh seed from these plants send me an email off list in mid May.
-Rob
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Hello Lesley, I wish it could be stabilised! I have plants here both grown from seed and collected as plants from the site in my photos in my previous post and even though the collected plants did have the intense red sepals in the wild, at best all I get here is a pink rim around the edge of the flower. We just don't get the long spells of intense, spring time sunshine that the plants would have to endure in the wild, so there is no need for them to produce the anthocyanins necessary to protect against photoinhibiton/high light stress. I'm sure that many plants of niger have the capacity to turn the sepals red if the situation is right and conditions are ideal... but not in dull, wet East Anglia :)
Rob, that colony of niger on the open, south facing slope is one of the few niger sites I have seen where there are a large amounts of seedlings. The plants don't really get any shade from the grass, although the roots are kept cool by it I suppose. The first three photos below show the same site as in my previous photos, but these photos were taken later on in the year in the first week of June.
The rest of the photos show a very open hillside in Croatia close to the border with Bosnia where H. torquatus grows happily. The last shot shows the natural variation of flower colour at this site (and at all other colonies of torquatus).
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Tim what an absolutely fantastic plant of torquatus. I hope one day to grow a plant that looks half as good
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Hi Ian, it's a stunner, isn't it? When I found this plant back in April of 2006, I thought I had made a very good mental note of exactly where in the colony it was. It didn't seem to be that hard to memorise the whereabouts of that plant; it was considerably bigger than most of the other plants at that site, it was very close to the road and it was only a few metres away from an electricity pylon.
I went back in June, eight weeks after seeing this colony in flower and do you think I could find that plant? I searched high and low but couldn't find it anywhere. It's not the first time this has happened and I have been known to struggle to find entire colonies before now, colonies I've been to on several occasions previously :)
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Well, we do (sometimes) have a very hot, dry spring and maybe the red colour would be produced here so come May, I'll be sending off a note to Rob - and thanks for the offer.
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It is a shame that you do not have a photos of the foliage. Do you remember seeing tiny hairs on the underside of the new, emerging foliage? Young H. odorus foliage is usually visibly pubescent, whereas the young emerging foliage of H. dumetorum is glabrous. The fact that you say that the foliage looks more like cyclophyllus would suggest to me that you do have odorus. It would be difficult to confuse dumetorum and odorus foliage with one another.
It is a nice plant and I hope that you are not disappointed if it is odorus and not dumetorum. Perhaps you will post photos when the foliage emerges.
There is nows leaves only besides the flowers, and there is no tiny hairs... Could the emerging leaves different ?
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I went back in June, eight weeks after seeing this colony in flower and do you think I could find that plant?
Isn't it amazing how fast all the grasses and other plants grow up to mask the springtime ones you hope to collect seed from?
I draw sketches and make arrangements of pebbles at the road edge, then put a short piece of coloured yarn around the flower stem. When I bought a digital camera, I started taking site photos. And now I have a GPS. I'll see how well that works. I intend to continue with the low tech recording as a backup, though.
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The combo of GPS and site photos should be pretty good, I would think? More stuff for you to carry, of course, but since it is only to easy to wander off a path further than one thinks when in hot pursuit of a plant, and in a direction that isn't clear when spending lots of time with your nose to a camera back, then perhaps a GPS is essential baggage for safety reasons!
I confess not to know much about Global Satellite Positioning whatevers (is that what the GPS stands for?) are all makes much the same or are some more reliable than others? Is a cheaper version going to strand you in Saltcoats when you wanted to be in Sakhalin? :-[
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Regarding buying anything technical: I go to a specialty store and chat to the clerks who usually are knowledgeable enthusiasts. I describe exactly what I need to do with the object in question, and usually one of the employees has tried all their brands and knows exactly which one will suit me.
The GPS I bought is bright yellow, so I won't lose it in the bushes.
A GPS itself is reasonably priced. Then you can pay lots of money for add-on maps. I don't need any of them, though. I use a topographical map and just want to pinpoint exactly where certain plants are. The young men at the store warned me about relying entirely on the GPS - they said to be sure to have a map and compass as backup.
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It's not particularly easy to identify hellebore species from the bracts alone. H. dumetorum and H. atrorubens tend to have extremely large bracts, but your plant has what I would call small bracts.
I think we will have to wait for the emerging leaves. We should be able to see the tiny hairs on the underside of the leaves as they push up through the soil surface, before they open out. It's not impossible for your plant to be odorus and for it to not have the hairs. Nothing is impossible with species hellebores...
Once the leaves open out, we will have more of an idea of the identity of your plant. Do you have, or could you take a photo of the whole plant just as it grows, without any hands in shot? I would like to see the form of the plant if possible.
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I'll try Tim ;), thank you for your help.
Moreover, is it the true H. atrorubens I Have ? I'm now doubtful of the identification of my helleborus species...
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H. atrorubens is the only violet flowered species (although green flowered variants do grow in every colony I've seen) present in Slovenia, so if you are sure that your atrorubens has reliable provenance (grown from wild collected seed for example), it cannot be any other species. It certainly looks right.
Problems occur when growers who are growing several different acaulescent species which are wild sourced, let those plants set open pollinated seed and then harvest the seed from each species and release this seed with the species name attached. The species are so variable that a plant grown from cultivated seed which might look a little different could either be showing hybrid qualities, or simply be showing the variation present in that particular species. In most cases it's impossible to know for sure.
There are growers who go to great lengths to make sure that cross pollination doesn't occur by hooding the flowers and whilst I'm slowly beginning to accept that practice, I don't do it myself, but then I'm in a position to travel once or twice a year to collect wild seed. I never used to let my species plants set seed at all, but I do now and do list it on the seed list. All I ask is that recipients label the offspring from open pollinated species seed as 'H. from ..........' I'm not entirely comfortable with releasing this seed, but on the other hand it seems crazy to deprive people of what will be some great plants. Those showing hybrid qualities will usually be exceptional.
Sorry for the wayward post...
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Yes my H. atrorubens is from reliable provenance.
I'm very interested in keeping the genetic purity of plants.
In my garden my few helleborus species are far one to the others. A solution you don't tell : I think it's possible a year we want to collect garden plant seeds, to cut the flowers of the species without interest, before opening, and then collect only the good ones.
If a day you have seeds from species with high cutted folliage, I would be interested ;)
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Sorry for the wayward post... says Tim
No need to apologise, Tim, this is of interest to many of us.
There are growers who go to great lengths to make sure that cross pollination doesn't occur by hooding the flowers
Yes, I see that Guy (Geebo) showed some hooded plants in one of his posts.
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Hello Maggi, my post was looking dangerously like a rant, hence my apology in advance :)
My soapbox for this subject is very well used...
Guy's contraptions for hooding the flowers in the other thread looked as if they worked very well; I must go into that thread to investigate more.
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While on a visit to croatia I collected some wild species of Hellebores, they are starting to develop now after 2 years growing in pots,I am not too sure what species they are, perhaps "Istriacus" ???
In the picture you notice the different shade of the leaves ??would they be different varieties of the species?
Cheers Guy
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Tim,
Now we can see that my plant is slightly pubescent : H. odorus then ?
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Yes, definitely odorus. The flower shape and small bracts always pointed towards your plant being odorus and the tiny hairs and the form of the emerging leaf shoot confirm this. Slovene odorus is often a smaller, more delicate form of the species than you would see growing in other countries. At last, you can label your plant!
Guy, those plants are examples of H. istriacus. I have a lot of istriacus grown from seed I collected high up in the Ucka mountains in Croatia and a lot of these plants have young emerging foliage which is dark. I will try to get some photos posted later on this evening.
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Thanks a lot Tim :D
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Guy, below are some photos of young, emerging foliage of H. istriacus. All of these plants have been grown from seed collected at one site high up in the Ucka mountains, Croatia.