Helen Ballard Hellebores

[assybish]

I have a national collection of hellebores and am trying to build up a collection of Helen Ballard's plants. After much trying I find that they have changed hands in Germany a time or two and no complete collection of her plants is in the UK.
If any one has plants of known provenance that could be divided or hand pollinated seed collected I will be very interested to hear from them. I can trade species seed or hybrids from my own breeding program.

[PeterT]

I can't remember who or where, but I know someone has either a collection of her plants or pure seed strains.
I will post the information if I recollect.

[Lina Hesseling]

Here in The Netherlands is a nursery that has many Hellebores. If I remember well, he started with some Hellebores from Helen Ballard. You could give it a try. www.hessenhof.nl
You can read his web-site in english.
Good luck!  Lina.

[Pieter]

Hello Assybish

I have some Ballard hybrids in my garden. They are all fairly dark red in flower color. THe picture included is an example of one of the dark ones but I also have some with a more grey veil covering the red and also with darker and lighter markings. I have some seed that I collected. If you are interested let me know.

Greetings

Pieter

[Lorraine Birchall]

We have Hellebore 'Philip Ballard' which my father-in-law bought from the Ballard's Nursery in the 1970's.
We propagate this by division on a regular basis.

We also grow some of Jim Archibald's cultivar's such as 'Pluto', 'Orion' and 'Titania' which he gave to us a few years ago.

Hope this is of some interest.

[Maggi Young]

Hello Lorraine.... it's a small world... I was just looking at your website... were your virtual ears burning?! 
http://www.talevalleynursery.co.uk/about.shtml

[plantomaniac]

Hello from Germany,
as far as I know the Ballard plants were originally given to Mrs Schmiemann in Cologne, and she recently passed her collection to Peter Janke in Hilden. He has a homepage

http://peter-janke-gartenkonzepte.de

where you can contact him via e-mail.
I hope this will help you.
Kind regards from Germany
Plantomaniac

[PDJ]

I have the following plants purchased from Helen Ballard over the years.  Unfortunately they aren't due for division this year but will have some divisions available spring 2013.
'Blue Showers'
'Button'
'Cheerful'
'Citron'
'Helen Ballard'
'Mystery'
'Rembrandt'
'Sarah Ballard'
'Saturn'
'Vulcan'