Flower Friday - My hero

My hero (that would be Monty Don) said that the only way to photograph a hellebore successfully was to snip the flower off and float it in water.

He's right.

We get Gardener's World on satellite and even though it's made for the UK, I can always get something from it.  The only thing that makes me smile is that so many of your desirable garden plants are prescribed weeds in Australia, and we can't plant them.  It's a bit like locking the stable door after the horse has bolted, because those plants that have a strangle hold in our bush areas are almost impossible to eradicate.

Most were brought in in the late 19th Century.

One of the most famous is Prickly Pear (opuntia spp).  Acknowledged as one of the greatest biological invasions of modern times, the introduction and subsequent spread of prickly pear into Queensland and New South Wales had infested millions of hectares of rural land by the 1920s, rendering it useless for agriculture. Prickly pear proved so difficult and costly to control by chemical and mechanical means that enormous areas were simply abandoned by their owners. 

Anyway that's besides the point of this blip.  This lovely hellebore has exquisite detail which can't be seen on the plant because of their shy habit of drooping their heads.