By far the best helebores I have seen this year, and that even includes NT gardens, are A's mother's in Somerset. They don't get any special treatment, they've just been in the same bed for years, admittedly a bed which is, at its highest, half a foot higher than the path beside it, from years of mulching with compost.
We took a trip out to one of my favourite local National Trust gardens on Saturday - Charlcote Park. The gardens aren't particularly extensive or notable, unlike nearby Hidcote, being mostly deer park, but the croquet lawn there has two long herbaceous border strips and I'd been hoping to plunder them for some inspiration for my own, much smaller, front path borders.
Unfortunately the borders were looking pretty sparse apart from some lovely dancing grasses, however on another deeper border near the cafe there was a much more unusual planting scheme...
