Out walking in the woods again yesterday, and I found ten clumps of hellebores! They look to me like a form of green hellebore, Helleborus occidentalis, with unusually large flowers; there was one very prolific clump (above, click to enlarge) and the rest were smaller, with some clumps too small to be flowering. All were scattered across an open east facing bank. Now hellebores are not native to North America – so what were they doing there? A couple of miles from the nearest house.

Actually, it was pretty obvious. The bank was at the edge of an unusually flat area; other non-natives were around including dense thickets of forsythia (below, click to enlarge - usually a sign of an old homestead), broad patches of Japanese pachysandra (Pachysandra terminalis) and bugle (Ajuga reptans), and three individual grape hyacinth (Muscari botryoides) bulbs with a single spike of flowers on each.

I’d say it was the site of an old homestead and this was confirmed by the fact that the whole area was relatively open compared with the surrounding forest. There was also what seemed to be the remains of a stone built water cistern, sunk in the ground and partially overgrown. And the trail along which I’d been walking when I spotted the hellebore clumps in the distance turned out to be a paved road that had been closed and become overgrown.

So, even though there was no sign of tumbledown walls, at some point in the past there must have been a house there and either the timber construction had simply rotted away or it been removed to be used again elsewhere. Helleborus occidentalis has a number of medicinal uses so it’s not surprising to see it on such a site.

Still – flourishing hellebores growing in the Pennsylvania woods 3000 miles from their native home in western Europe (including Britain) was quite a sight to see. Of course there are some people who’d have them ripped out as “invasive aliens” – see my recent piece on snowdrops. So I’m not going to say exactly where they are!