Hellebores fabulous finale in the winter garden

They are perhaps the most beautiful of all herbaceous perennials.

Gardener, writer and artist Graham Stuart Thomas (d. 2003) illustrated the cover of his 1976 classic Perennial Garden Plants with a painting of hellebores which says it all: their form, texture and proportions are unsurpassed in the gardener's world of flowers.

I need hardly add there was one bad fairy at their christening: their blooms hang face down to the ground so you can only enjoy their beautiful interiors by lying on your back underneath them.

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The contortions you endure photographing them are indescribable, but nothing's perfect in this world. One reason I love H. 'Anna's Red' is that she has relatively upright flowers.

Hellebores, known in the northern hemisphere as Christmas and Lenten roses because of their flowering times, are found in the wild mostly around the Mediterranean, west to Spain and east to Turkey, and also in Britain (H. foetidus) and far off Tibet (H. thibetanus). They are reliably frost hardy and like cool, damp winters, thriving in gardens on the ranges and western slopes, ideal for the shade of deciduous trees as they need winter sun to flower - don't plant them in the shade of conifers.

They are happy in reasonably well drained soil and tolerate dry summers, though do well in northern NSW with summer rainfall. They like alkaline soil so mine get a regular feed of lime in autumn, when I cut down their old decaying leaves the better to see the late winter flowers.

Hellebores fall into two categories, the true herbaceous species including H. orientalis and its hybrids which grow in clumps, and the species and hybrids, including Anna's Red, that produce a thick, leafy stem one year that flowers the next, before dying to make space for new shoots.

Botanists describe the two categories as caulescent (stemmed) and acaulescent (non-stemmed), one of those infuriating distinctions that is meaningless to the average gardener as all hellebore flowers have stems.

The actual difference between the categories lies in their growth habits, meaning that only the herbaceous species (so-called non-stemmed) can be increased by division; the rest are increased by seed.

The most popular and easily grown hellebores are the numerous forms of H. x hybridus. I started off with a few plants from a friend with white, purple and freckled pink flowers and they have spread and hybridised to make a glorious display every August under an old crab apple.

Among the 'stemmed', ahem, species I have H. foetidus from the English woodlands of my childhood, with pale green, bell-like flowers edged maroon, and H. argutifolius from Corsica, with slightly bigger, apple green bells and shiny, toothed leaves.

Anna's Red is my most recent acquisition with burgundy flowers, red stems and silvery veined leaves: slow to increase but worth the wait.