Thoughts off the top of my head: November, 2016
Most of you think that I eat, breathe, and sleep hostas; that I am hostas 24/7. I guess that is how it appears to you all since we usually see each other only at hosta events. To set the record straight, while hostas are part of my life most every day of the year and I do occasionally dream about them, I do not eat them! Never!
I assume likewise that you are probably crazier about hostas than you really are. I see glimpses in the hospitality room at hosta conventions to support this contention. In the “old days” in those late night hotel rooms all the talk way past midnight was just about hostas. The topics of new hostas, hosta nomenclature, hosta pests, and even hosta people, those not in the room of course, were discussed ad infinitum. But now there is more talk of grandchildren and the last foreign destination that was visited than hosta talk. Maybe we are just getting older or maybe we just know so darn much about hostas now that there is little that is controversial, or even new and interesting about them to discuss. I hope not.
But I want to go a step further. Are you ever bored with hostas? I don’t mean you take a break from hostas, like when winter comes and you put your hosta thoughts to bed with your garden and throw your energy into your winter hobbies. I mean really bored, bordering on sick of hostas, well on the way to burned out on hostas. Do you ever feel like that?
Now maybe because it is a hobby for you and a life style for me, you never really get tired of hostas but I do. There are some days that if someone came in the nursery, especially in late summer, and offered me almost any amount of money for the whole thing, I would throw them the keys as fast as I could and drive off into the sunset. Really, now we all have bad days, months or years, but that is not what I’m talking about here either.
Sometimes, more often now, hostas for me become tiresome, too predictable. They are unexciting. I have seen probably 4000 different hostas in the past 35 years and it takes a lot now to catch my eye and excite me. Back when Cody was in about 8th grade I started to feel a similar boredom with hostas. (I had only seen 3000 different cultivars then.) It was winter and we were in Arizona visiting family. The housing market had crashed and there were several very nice homes with unbelievable views for sale at a fraction of their value. We actually toured several and seriously kicked around the idea of moving there. I said if Hosta College that year did not get me excited about hostas again, we would seriously look at moving.
But Hosta College did the trick, maybe it was the classes but maybe the people, and I was ready to feel that passion, that love of hostas for another year. What got the juices flowing again was hybridizing. I had crossed hostas from the late 1980’s but not aggressively. Hosta hybridizing became an exciting adventure and there were many up and coming hybridizers with which to exchange ideas and help me chase illusive traits in hostas. I chose to pursue red hosta leaves as you know, without ever thinking I would produce any. Chasing the impossible may get frustrating sometimes but it is never boring.
Amazingly, one afternoon I found what would become ‘First Blush’ PPAF in the seedling house and the impossible became reality. The whole ‘First Blush’ PPAF saga has been quite a ride. From its discovery, to the theft of the original plants, to its incredible marketing success, it has been a wonderful blessing.
But how do you top that? I think as humans we all crave new things, sights and sounds. That is why we travel to the far reaches of the globe. That is what makes our grandchildren so mesmerizing. Watching them grow from babies to college graduates or football stars or hosta collectors, we never know how the story will turn out. It is the future and the unknown that keeps us from getting bored with the present and the familiar.
So what futuristic hostas fill my dreams now? What is the new impossible dream to chase for another ten years? Some say flowers, yes hosta flowers. You know those unruly things that you cut off as soon as they appear. The unthinkable goal is a hosta plant, a good looking hosta plant by the way, with daylily-like flowers. There is nothing boring about that. I think it is possible, more or less, and that maybe tetraploid hosta seedlings hold the key to accomplishing it. It will take a lot of work by many hosta hybridizers, much of which is already well underway, but I this time will leave it to them.
I think there are still lots of room for new minis. I am very excited about my about my new yellow seedling that sparkles in the sun, ‘Fairy Dust’ that should be available next year. We need little blue hostas that grow fast, also. The best source of new miniature hostas might just be sports of the ones we already have. That’s how this mini thing really got going in the first place with ‘Pandora’s Box’ and all those mice. Now that I grow my own liners, I also get all the sports. Sport fishing for new hostas in the spring is never boring.
I plan to play more with fragrant flowered hostas next year. I have hybridized them in the past but have become frustrated by the infertility of fragrant seedlings. My quest will be for very fertile fragrant flowered pod parents that maintain that fertility for several generations much as my red hosta seedlings have. Using fragrant flowered tetraploid hostas as parents may be the key to that also as more chromosomes might overcome some of the problems with infertility. This is certainly true of ‘Mojito’.
Hostas with twisted leaves may really be my new passion. I want blue ones and yellow ones as well as green ones. Just the thought of them makes me happy. I have several seedlings from the past couple of years that should go “bank or bust” next spring. I plan on distributing some of these seedlings to other hybridizers also so that we can all work together. Working in isolation can get, well, a little boring.
Maybe we all just need to play “Fantasy Hostas”. What would you like to see? Maybe that would make a good Hosta College course next year, a group discussion, hybridizers and collectors welcome. I bet we could build the plans for a better hosta and maybe just figure out a way to bring it to life. Now wouldn’t that be fun.
On this dreary day as I look out the window at my poor tired sagging hostas waiting for our first long overdue killing freeze, maybe I just need spring to return and see my babies, both giants and minis, emerge with perfect fresh leaves and happy dispositions to lift my spirits. The dance of spring is always contagious and then inevitably the hosta bugs bites. Nothing boring about that for sure!!! This year it can’t come soon enough for me.
You may be wondering about my fascination with fragrant hostas, especially those of you who cut your hosta flowers off as soon as they rear their ugly scapes. What’s the big deal, anyway? Is this just a hybridizer thing, trying to accomplish the near impossible? Maybe, it is the intellectual challenge that does excite me, always has.
But fragrant-flowered hostas are rare. Of the nearly 10,000 named hostas only 266 have fragrant flowers according to Don Rawson’s latest count. Some of these are forms of the species H. plantaginea and some are hybrids of it and its children but many are sports, especially of the ‘Fragrant Bouquet’/’Guacamole’ line. Many named by Paul Aden no longer exist. So the real number is really much smaller. Even if we take Don’s number on faith, then less than 3% of all hostas have fragrant flowers.
In addition, just because these 266 hostas have been described as fragrant by someone, (someone with a more highly trained nose than me), it doesn’t mean that they fill the garden with wafts of sweetness. Many are only slightly fragrant or fragrant in just the perfect environmental conditions. Usually, it is first generation children of H. plantaginea that are the most fragrant with fragrance diminishing with subsequent generations.
But there are really not that many subsequent generations anyway as sterility becomes a major problem very quickly in line breeding. In my experience, H. plantaginea is most successfully pollinated in the evening on nights with high humidity. This usually means saving pollen from earlier in the day to cross on to it after 8:00 PM. A few hybrids set seed, like ‘Invincible’, fairly reliably but most do not. The pollen is very problematical also.
The problem is simple. If you took all the hosta species in Japan, Korea and China and split them into two groups based on similarity, H. plantaginea would be in one group by itself and all the other species would be in the other group. The two groups have evolved very differently with H. plantaginea, thought to be more primitive, being moth pollinated and the other species being bee pollinated. Thus there are the large white flowers with fragrance to attract night flying insects of H. plantaginea and the smaller, purple-striped bee friendly morning opening flowers of the rest of the hosta species.
Evening blooming makes hybridizing trickier but is also one of the really cool things about fragrant hostas. I love the garden at dusk and the sweet fragrance of hosta flowers in August reminding me of the groves of orange blossoms of my youth. Those large masses of flowers on ‘Royal Standard’ and the ‘Guacamole’ clan bring the garden back to life after July’s firestorm, beckoning me to linger past dark.
But the best thing about fragrant hostas is that they do not grow like other hostas, they grow better and with more determination. Unlike H. sieboldiana cultivars, the children of H. plantaginea have a vigorous growth rate, making several flushes of leaves during the summer. In fact the first flush of leaves is often brown and shriveled by the time the flowers appear, shaded out by the two, three or even four flushes that followed it. Fragrant hostas are generally sun tolerant but do require additional water to keep their somewhat delicate foliage from burning.
Forever, we have wanted a blue hosta that would grow fast and be sun tolerant, at least in cooler climates. Hybridizing just never seemed to get all the right genes in the same genome. But then came along ‘Ambrosia’ PPAF and its fragrant flowers and its extra waxy leaves. The solid-colored sports from it were inevitable and sure enough the solid blue form, ‘Blue Perfection’, was found rather quickly. It seems that hostas did what man could not, produce that perfect blue hosta that grows fast, tolerates sun and by the way has fragrant flowers. Pretty cool.
Oh yea, frequently I have visitors to the nursery who are looking for a fast growing, dependable hosta, that can be planted in too much sun and still survive. They want a beginner’s foolproof hosta. I usually show them ‘Guacamole’ or ‘Honey Pie’ and add that they are fragrant hostas, too. Every once in a while, one of the customers will reach down and smell the leaves and then look at me with a disappointed frown. Embarrassed, I then have to say that it is the flowers, which are nowhere to be seen, that are fragrant, not the leaves. So again, what’s the big deal about fragrant flowers anyway?