SOME spring flowers - such as primroses, snowdrops and wood anemones - are indisputably and immediately beautiful, and fit easily into the "little treasures" category. Others are a different matter altogether and, as with oysters, Guinness or stinkily-ripe cheese, the only way you learn to love them is by being told to. But when you learn, oh, how you love them! Passionately. Obsessively. You want to be with them all the time. You can't stop talking about them. You become a bore.
The hellebore is such a flower (not for nothing is it nicknamed the "helluva bore"). The first time you see one, it's not going to stop you in your tracks, like a proud daffodil trumpet or a raft of blue-bells. It is a drudge-coloured thing that hangs its head among a cluster of coarse leaves. But when you lift the drooping blossom, you discover a miniature baroque fountain of stamens, style and nectaries rising from hand-painted petals - actually, they're called tepals - of pink, or green-tinged white or dusty plum or even blue-black.
Some of the best hellebores in Ireland are in Helen and Val Dillon's Ranelagh garden. "Come on! You have to see every single one until you never want to see another one again," says an enthusiastic Helen Dillon, moving from clump to clump. "Look at this one, it's called `Old Ugly'"
"Old Ugly" has a mucous-green flower with heavy maroon mottling - "Doesn't that just make you groan with delight? And there's a double one! Look! It's called `Gunther Jurgl' - pale pink and delicately spotted - "And this is `Philip Ballard', he has wonderful seedlings".
Being a hellebore-lover is all about raising more and more hellebores, better and better ones through constant breeding and selecting, selecting and breeding. It's all about getting more yellow in this plant, more red in that, less spots on this one, a better cupshape on that. And how to get more of the covetable grey bloom - like that on a black grape - on to the flower, and how to achieve the ultimate goal: a wonderful plant with good colour, a good shape and an upturned flower head. As you can imagine, with so many characteristics to fiddle around with, it's a never-ending project for the happy breeder. And when a plant doesn't come up to scratch, "it just has to go because it's leaving bad genes in the pot".
But the Dillon garden in spring not just a stud farm for hellebores. Early in the year it is filled with countless varieties of snow-drops, and sheets of Crocus tommasinianus, a "wild and weedy one" which has seeded itself all over to form a luminous lilac-blue mist floating a few inches above the soil.
As the snowdrops fade away and as the crocuses keel over on to the ground, another lot of spring flowers takes over, hugging the ground with cautious growth. The curious epimediums are there, with their veiny heart-shaped leaves and their insect-like flowers on wiry stems. The pulmonarias - or lungworts - are there too: their spotted, lung-like leaves were once used as a cure for "infirmities and ulcers of the lungs" according to the 16th-century Gerard's Herbal.
And under the ancient Bramley apple tree is Omphalodes - or navelwort - `Starry Eyes' and no, it was not used to remedy afflictions of the navel. `Starry Eyes' is a delicate, pretty, Irish plant with dainty, five-petalled flowers frilled in whitish-mauve. There are other Irish plants in the Dillon garden including the primroses, Primula "Garryarde Guinevere", with a bronzed leaf and pink flower and "Lady Greer", "who is pale and wan and rather sad looking" - in other words, pale cream.
But the most prized of primulas are kept under cover in the alpine house. Primula allionii is "easy to grow, but it must never, ever have moisture on the leaves". Its foliage forms a neat dome studded with flat-faced, regular flowers rather like old-fashioned bathing caps ... And there is Primula marginata with its leaves covered in farina, a floury golden dust. "It's a perfectly hardy plant, and if you put it outside it would flower, but it would have a green leaf with no gold dust stuff."
Precious floral gold dust inside and brave, early plants outside, nudging their way in through the barely-open door of spring: catch it now, before the summer garden erupts from the earth, drowning out all that went before.