Join in the Hellebore Festival Next Year!
What’s a Festival and How Does It Work?
A ‘Festival’ of a particular kind of flower or garden feature is a great way to help us promote gardens in a new or different way, by linking them together with an overarching theme. A great example of this is the Snowdrop Festival. Using a ‘Festival’ idea helps us to attract new press coverage, share themed social media and promote a series of openings as a special collection.
The Hellebore Festival Pilot 2026 (should we call it a ‘Celebration of Hellebores’ as we did before?
Early this year, sandwiched between the early snowdrop Festival and our main spring season when openings really start to accelerate, we launched the inaugural Hellebore Festival, mainly taking place in Fife, although with another. The Hellebore Festival is beautifully timed to bridge the Spring gap at a time which is traditionally quite quiet, and so there is potential for hellebore openings to be popular, as people are looking for ways to get out and enjoy the outdoors after the short winter days.
And who knew that hellebores garden hybrids were such unsung heroes! They are such stalwarts of late winter and early spring with flowers that seem to go on forever and that beautiful glossy foliage. The Hellebore Festival was initiated thanks to Sally Lorimore of Willowhill, hellebore garden enthusiast and grower of an exciting range of hellebore garden hybrids, showing that hellebores are not just the traditional whites, greens and pinks, but branching into a wide range of new wonderful, colourful forms, such as ‘yellows’, ‘daybreak’ and ’sunset’ shades.
Willowhill is not alone in being a haven for hellebores and five other Fife gardens to joined in too, as well as another in Kirkcudbrightshire.
With seven Hellebore Festival gardens joining in and thanks to additional plant sales by Sally, the Festival openings raised a total of over £8,000 - thank you to all who participated!
Calling fellow Hellebore fans - would you like to participate in the Hellebore Festival in 2027?
We’ll be adding a database ‘tag’ so we can share this as a proper festival in its own right so if you would like to join in with a hellebore opening, we can now do so.
Some points about joining:
You should be willing to commit to an open day between 27 February - 11 April
You should have a reasonable display of hellebores and some other spring interest such as bulbs or evergreen backdrop
You can choose your own charity to receive up to 60% - as usual
If you are usually open this time and have hellebores blooming, do feel free to join in - we’ll add the ‘tag’ to your opening.
If you’d like to give it a try, please get in touch with your District Organiser who will be able to add a Hellebore Festival opening to your database registration for 2027. Or get in touch with Head Office via info@scotlandsgardens.org.
Do you have ideas for other Festivals or Themes? We’d love to hear from you! We’ve already had one suggestions…. a hydrangea festival in August with all those wonderful new paniculata varieties now available.
