Hey. Here's the deal with hellebores. (I copied this from an email I sent to someone else.)
My blooming plants are burgundyish, green and one is cream with rasp. spots. I believe mine are called the royal strain. Unless you are raising them under a super, super controled environment where you totally control the pollination, the flower color can not be determined until they bloom. (And no grower has ever confirmed to me that this is fool-proof.) Fortunatly, they are all beautiful!
These seedlings are from seeds that dropped April '07. They will not flower for 2 years. Hellebores are slow growing to start, but make up for it as adult plants. I think the long baby-to-bloom time is why they are one of the more expensive perenials. Once they hit that 3rd year, they really burst into their glory.
Anyway, all the growers I've spoken to have told me that even the ones that they sell are unknown colors until they bloom. If you want a definate color, buy it in bloom or buy a mature plant that has bloomed for the grower and they can label it.
So all the babies will be surprises for me as well as you.
This is from Pine Knot Farms:
Breeding Helleborus
Breeding Hellebores is slow work and it can be habit forming! I began breeding hoping to create a pure white Lenten Rose or Helleborus xhybridus and soon found that I wanted more. Fortunately the process itself is simple, the only hard part is waiting for several years to see the results. Over the last dozen years we have developed relatively stable colour strains. But, and this is a big one, even with the best of strains, there is no way to predict with 100% accuracy, what the colour of an unbloomed plant will be. The plants in the image below were all grown from the same seed capsule, a wonderful visual example of why plants MUST bloom before color can be guaranteed.
