Oh, Hellebores

Want an excuse to travel to Virginia? Is a Hellebore Festival temptation enough? Here is the announcement I received by email this morning.

Hellebore Festival 2009
This year we will offer a larger number of companion plants for hellebores than ever before. We will have Cyclamen and other surprises from John Lonsdale's Edgewood Gardens, this year John will be here to help answer questions. http://www.edgewoodgardens.net/

Asiatica in Virginia?
Yes! This year Barry Yinger from Asiatica Nursery will bring down a tempting selection of Arisaemas and other special plants to tempt our customers. http://www.asiaticanursery.com/index.cfm?

Once again there will be a few special Hepaticas from the Japanese nursery of our friend Takayuki Miura http://www3.tokai.or.jp/yumehanabito/

For the last few years the popular mail order nursery Plant Delights near Raleigh NC has been opening in conjunction with our festival weekends. They offer a most tempting list of plants.

Two other superb mail-order nurseries, Camellia Forest and Niche Gardens near Chapel Hill NC are also open. We provide maps to all these places so our customers can make the rounds.

We will have potted small bulbs, Galanthus, Crocus and species Narcissus as well as the fragrant shrubs Daphne and Edgeworthia. We will be featuring four different clones of H. niger and H. xericsmithii, H foetidus and of course thousands of blooming Lenten Roses in three different sizes this year!

Each year we open our nursery, gardens and Stock House to hellebore lovers from all over the country. We often see the early birds wandering around the garden when we are making the coffee at 7:30 although the sale does not open till 10:00 am. Those folks are first in line for the rare and unusual.

This year's dates are Saturday February 28 and also Friday March 6 & Saturday March 7 from 10 am to 4 pm.

There will be many, many surprises this year, so plan to come and see for yourself. Because they were so popular we will be offering blooming hellebores in several sizes again this year. Tempting double and single flowering Helleborus x hybridus, the popular Lenten Rose, species and interspecies hybrids blooming both in our tunnels and in the gardens. Unlike many nurseries, our plants are bred and grown here at the farm in unheated tunnels and freeze every night the temperatures do and are hardy enough to travel to colder climates without undue stress.

If the weather is kind and the sun warms the Edgeworthias and Daphnes the fragrance of Spring greets visitors as they leave their cars. On cold or rainy days the aroma of coffee from the urns in our large shipping house is almost as welcoming. We are always grateful to our friends and family who flock in from fields afar to help us on these days. We quite honestly and literally could not have these events without them. Many of you now recognize our son Richard and his partner our son-in-law Jamie who run the registers, our daughter Helen who answers questions, our son-in-law Greg and grandson Josh who ferry plants to the parking area. My mother and our granddaughter Ruth help keep the coffee urns and pastry tables stocked.

At other times of the year we welcome visitors by appointment. We are a small nursery and do not staff full time retail department. For while we are 18 miles from I85 we are located in a very rural section of Virginia surrounded by water and North Carolina. As you drive to the farm it is a bit like driving back in time, JOIN US!

Dick, Judith and the crew at PKF
Bring a copy of this email for a free plant!
phone 434-252-1990

The event sounds very nice no matter what the weather and obviously will appeals to lots of plant lovers.
What I find amusing is that nowhere is there a name or an address for the nursery sponsoring the events. Other nurseries in the area are listed with web links but the host nursery is called only PKF.

Comments

Anonymous said…
If you're going I'll have to send my order with you! :)
Molly Day said…
Oh, I was hoping someone reading the blog would go and pick up plants for me, Zach.

Maybe someone will volunteer to shop for both of us.

Someone who knows where the festival is held, of course.
;-)

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