Penny Dawson of Twelve Nunns, a mail-order nursery located in rural Lincolnshire specialises in selling Harvington hellebores alongside a few choice woodlanders and bulbous plants. She’s a second-generation nurserywoman, her nursery’s name being a combination of the surnames of her parents: Hugh Nunn and Liz Twelves. This plant-mad family have spent 40 years developing colour-themed Harvington hellebore seed, having realised that there were very few choice hellebores available in the 1980s.
This dearth arose because hellebores resent being divided into small pieces. You have to split them into generous chunks, so one plant would produce only three to six divisions every three years or so. As a consequence, demand always outstripped supply. Many a gardener,