2008 seed lists. We aim to have the seed lists ready by the end of June. So far we have made one collecting trip for seed of Helleborus hercegovinus and we will be travelling again soon for seed of H. odorus, H. torquatus, H. niger and seed of some as yet unnamed species. The cyclamen seed list will be ready at the same time. If you are interested in receiving one or both of the seed lists via email or snail-mail, please do get in touch as soon as possible. If you do want anything from the lists it is advisable to order as soon as possible after receiving them because some of the items on both lists are in short supply.

This website is under construction. We have uploaded this 'about us' page so that we have at least some web presence whilst we build the rest of the site. We are aiming to have the website online as soon as possible, but it is proving to be a slow process.

We will be offering hellebores for sale via mail order from early spring 2008. We will have a wide range of species hellebores available, all of which have been grown from wild collected seed.

Contact details

Broughton Nursery, 5 School Road, Broughton, Cambridgeshire, PE28 3AT, United Kingdom.

 Tel: +44 (0) 1487 822900

e-mail: sales@broughtonnursery.co.uk

About us

We began growing hellebores in 1998, starting with the popular garden hybrids (H.x hybridus). Being purists at heart, we wanted to know more about wild species hellebores, many of which have been used to develop the hybrid hellebores available today. Accurate information was and still is hard to come by and in 2001 our search led us to Will McLewin at Phedar Nursery, who is widely regarded as the world authority on the genus. Since then we have become good friends and it was Will's infectious enthusiasm that was the driving force behind the decision to make our first trip out to the Balkans in 2001 to study species hellebores in the wild. We have been travelling out to the Balkans every year (twice in 2004 and three times in 2006) since then, and we will continue to carry out fieldwork on a regular basis for as long as we are able to do so.

We never intended to start a nursery. Our first house had a very small garden and after five years of living there we had finally run out of room in the garden. We moved to our current property in 2003 and the whole site sits on roughly quarter of an acre. We simply wanted somewhere to grow large quantities of species hellebores so that we could study them at our leisure. It became clear quite quickly that we were growing more species and hybrid plants than we could use, so these were made available for sale to like-minded enthusiasts. We now grow relatively large quantities of species and hybrids so that we can meet the steady demand and most of these plants start out in our most recent (erected in May 2006) 20x10 feet polytunnel. All of the funds raised from plant sales are used to offset the cost of our fieldwork in the Balkans. We have been collecting seed from wild populations since 2001 and in 2005 we published our first hellebore seed list. We nearly always collect more than we can use ourselves so a seed list seemed like the sensible thing to do. As with the plant sales, funds from seed sales help to offset the cost of our fieldwork.

Although we now grow many hybrid hellebores for sale, we are not all that bothered about doing much hybridising as there are enough people already doing it who have more time, patience and room than we do. Any hybridising that we do find the enthusiasm for always involves wild species hellebores (usually as the pollen parent) and is driven by self-indulgence and curiosity rather than a desire to create the 'next big thing'. At the moment we do no hybridising at all using only hybrid parent plants.

We began growing cyclamen at around the same time as we started with the hellebores. At our first house we grew all of our cyclamen in two very small (6x4 feet) glasshouses. We sold surplus plants at Cyclamen Society shows and struggled to keep up with demand for our plants with such a small amount of room. When we moved to our current property the two small glasshouses came with us and we added a larger (12x8 feet) glasshouse for our stock plants. In October of 2003 we erected the first 20x10 feet polytunnel and this houses all of our cyclamen seedlings from germination onwards We are still short of room and plans are being made for several frames to be built around the nursery site so that we can grow more cyclamen to meet an ever increasing demand. We will also be adding another glasshouse (20x8 feet) which will be used primarily as a sales house. As well as publishing our first hellebore seed list in 2005, we also published our first cyclamen seed list in the same year and we are pleased to be able to offer seeds from a wide range of species, including some not available from any other commercial source. Our approach towards cyclamen is generally more relaxed than it is with hellebores. We are deeply interested in the taxonomic problems entrenched within the genus Helleborus and whilst cyclamen are not without their taxonomic problems, we simply enjoy them for what they are; fantastic plants for the garden and glasshouse.

In the not too distant future we will start to hold hellebore and cyclamen open days here at the nursery so that enthusiasts will be able to see our species and hybrid hellebores growing in the garden and nursery, and our cyclamen growing in the nursery and stock glasshouse. We will also offer a wide range of hellebores and cyclamen for sale on our open days. Details will appear on the website as and when firm arrangements have been made.

© Tim Murphy 2007