2008 will be our largest festival ever!
Plants are under cover aso we are open in RAIN, SLEET or SHOW!

       In 2008 we will be open for our Hellebore Festival an extra day. By popular demand we will be open on Saturday February 23 and also Friday February 29 and Saturday March 1st from 10 am to 4 pm.  There will be some surprises this year, come and see for yourself.  We will be offering blooming hellebores in several sizes this year. Tempting single flowering hellebores, doubles, species and interspecies hybrids blooming both in our tunnels and in the gardens will delight your eyes.  Unlike many nurseries, our plants are grown in unheated tunnels and freeze every night the temperatures do and are hardy enough to travel to colder climates without undue stress.

        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.
 
        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 often partner with growers of specialty plants that flower in late winter early spring. 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.

        
       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, congestion thins and trees abound.

        For the last few years the popular mail order nursery Plant Delights near Raleigh NC has been opening on our festival weekends. 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.

    This year we will offer a larger number of companion plants for hellebores than ever before. 
We will have Cyclamen from John Lonsdale's Edgewood Gardens http://www.edgewoodgardens.net/
Special Hepaticas from the Japanese nursery of our friend Takayuki Moiré at http://www3.tokai.or.jp/yumehanabito/
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!