I often run into high-powered plant people, much more knowledgeable than me, who ask, “Haven’t hosta hybridizers done about all you can do with hostas? They all are starting to look the same to me.” I guess that is true if you discount all the new red blushing hostas but then, the novelty may wear off even blushers one day.

            I often wonder what is the next big improvement that hybridizers can bring to their hosta seedlings. Red is not dead. Hostas can still become redder, but also the red can last all season. I’d say, Dan Heims’ ‘Liam’s Smile’ is a more dependable blushing hosta in warmer climes with interestingly more purple in the leaf veins than in the petioles. It is a new ingredient to add to the hybridizing pot.   

Some hosta hybridizers think hosta flowers might be the next best thing. They are producing many new colors for hosta flowers, rich dark purples, even black, light pinks, and reds, as well as yellow and green. I have seen brown ones too, interesting but looking faded when fresh. Large, pink flowers on a blue hosta might be a showstopper.

            But flowers and red trim are accessories, much like the messy ruffles on many of the new blue hostas these days. Maybe that is where we are with the breeding right now, just a little tweak here and little tweak there. Hosta specialists might appreciate these new bells and whistles, but they may be lost on the gardening public or even high-level horticulturists.

            So, what is really new in hostas? Well, have you ever seen a yellow hosta that turns blue? Yellow hostas usually green up a little, or a lot, later in the season. They almost never have a blue cast to them. That’s different! For many years we just called it 44B, a great hybridizing hosta, a parent of ‘Ruby Earrings’ and ‘Peach Brandy’, and now I am ready to pass it along to you. It is ‘Calm before the Storm’, bright yellow sunshine in early spring and then suddenly an afternoon storm brewing. Its rich purple petioles highlight the spring yellow color and the stormy summer feel. Check it out in the shop. I think it is pretty cool!

As many of you know, I am a child of the tropics. I did not see snow until I went to college in North Carolina. This January I got my fill of the weekly snow storms, so I took a friend and ran off to Florida to feel some 80 degree tropical breezes and connect again with the palms I grew as a kid.

          They call it a jungle for a reason. The plant life is coarse, wild, and a tangled mess. Even botanical gardens cannot escape the chaos. But a visit is exhilarating. Sometimes I just do not want that much organization in my life.

          But most times I do and that’s why hostas are the focus of my life. Unlike murderous strangler figs, monstera vines that devour pines, and sabal palms casually dropping their dead frons haphazardly everywhere, hostas are neat, maybe even a little formal. Yes, they pretty much stay where you plant them right behind their labels but there is more. Their leaves are symmetric, their clumps perfectly mounded. They make borders, they bring order to the garden. Their colors are refined not riotous like bromeliads. 

          Hostas give us calm and peace in the summer garden. In winter we can escape to the festive tropics but in summer we want the tranquility of our hosta gardens. For me, I need both, chaos and organization in my life. Too much of either one is not healthy. People say that hostas have tropical foliage, I would disagree. They do have dramatic foliage but it is well behaved. I actually wish they would cut loose every once in a while.

          There is a hosta that spends the winter in Florida. They call it the SUN HOSTA ^TM. It is actually ‘So Sweet’ and is virtually evergreen there. I have included a photo of it in a container at the entrance of the Port St. Lucie Botanical Garden next to a croton, maybe my favorite plant. (Is that heresy?) It does look well behaved, doesn’t it?

Yes, there is now a little beach sand on the mats my truck and there is a pirated bag of palm seeds on the kitchen counter. You never know, they just might magically spring to life in the nursery when summer finally arrives. 

Blog 4: Flower Power

Hi again. This has been a crazy year here at Green Hill Farm shipping hostas. That is not a bad thing. Believe it or not Erin and I slipped in and out of Iowa a week ago. In the Country Garden and Gifts in Independence has an event every summer that features some of the best new hostas on the market and a few words from me. This year I talked, at Josh’s request, about the hybridizing process that produced my red hostas.

Speaking of red hostas, while the emphasis is always on the petioles and leaves, many red hostas have awesome scapes and flowers. I do not blame you if you cut the flowers off your grandma’s hostas as they appear. They are gangly and flop everywhere, but new hostas have amazing scapes and flowers, and if you really must remove them, then bring them inside as a cut flower bouquet. They will last for a week or more.

The Japanese are far ahead of us in creating interesting hosta flowers. ‘Miracle Lemony’ is a light yellow flowered hosta. They also have many doubled flowered hostas and colors that range from brown to red to green and all shades of purple in between. Often it is the patterns of stripes inside of the flower, the runway for bees to land, that is the most highly colored. Take a peek sometime.  

But do you really care? After all, hostas are foliage plants, and in temperate climates some of the best. Maybe flowers are not your passion, but scapes are cool especially as they emerge. Here is a look at a couple of seedlings of mine that I keep just for their colorful bloom scapes. They will probably never be introduced as the leaves are nondescript for hostas are bought for their foliage and not for their flowers, at least not yet.

Tetraploid hostas, (those hostas that have doubled their chromosomes), you knew the topic would be visited eventually. At Green Hill Farm we believe that tetraploid hostas may or may not be the future of hostas but until we hybridize a lot of tets we will never know. To this end we have been propagating tetraploid forms of named hostas as we find them and would like to make them available to hosta hybridizers for a nominal cost so that they might have new tetraploid plants to cross.

Converted tetraploid hostas, either by the use of herbicides or “naturally” in Tissue Culture, differ from their “parents” by having thicker leaves, wider margins if variegated, a more compact habit, shorter scapes and a denser arrangement of flowers. All these are positive, (improvements), traits, but they also have shorter roots and a slower growth rate. Some like ‘Mojito’ from ‘Fried Green Tomatoes are more fertile than their parent, but some are not. The flowers are larger as are the fertile parts, pollen, and pods in these tets. There is good and bad in everything.

Here is our first offering to hybridizers. I had a choice to make, when introducing this hosta especially for hybridizing. I could name it and register it, or just introduce it under the name, “tetraploid ‘World Cup’”. I decided on the latter because I believe that hybridizing hostas should be shared and not necessarily marketed. I could have given it some name that was just a group of letters and numbers like some folks do but is that really fun? The name is self-explanatory but not a fancy name for the general public. Actually, I am not sure this plant is a good garden plant, but it will allow you to bring several traits, including gold color, extreme cupping and upright habit into your tetraploid hybridizing program.

So how do you get one? I have several plants of tetraploid ‘World Cup’ that I actually tissue cultured for just this purpose. See, we are having fun now. I think they are blooming size but if not this year next year for sure. All you have to do is contact me through our Order Form on our HostaHosta.com website and I will send you one. I will only charge you $20 for shipping. You will get two plants and you can start to work your magic.  

This offer is open to everyone in the United States, we can maybe make other arrangements if you live elsewhere, but please do not name this plant. It is a legitimate hosta with an illegitimate name. Feel free to pass it along in a few years when it finally increases. Tetraploids are slow! Have fun with this… that will make me smile.  

            How often do you think about hosta roots? You may curse them if they are a solid tangled block devoid of any potting mix when you finally decide to repot that hosta that you should have shifted two years ago. Or maybe it is the emotional heartbreak when your prize hosta has been “voled” and it now is devoid of roots. Hosta roots generally do not attract many admirers, out of sight, out of mind.

            I observe a multitude of hosta roots almost daily during shipping season. If you received a box of hostas from us this week you may have noticed that our hostas are making their new roots right now. These inch or so very shiny bright, white roots are stretching down from the base of the hosta crown above last year’s roots. Yes, hostas actually grow themselves up out of the ground each year making new rings of roots above the old ones like adding floors to an apartment building under construction.   

            Hostas for whatever reason, and I know they must have a good one, wait about three weeks after their leaves emerge to make new roots. They make leaves, then roots, more leaves and then more roots. For each flush of foliage there is a corresponding flush of roots that follows. Those new roots grow rapidly reaching the bottom of a properly sized pot in 2-3 weeks. Pretty handy.

            Finally, not all hosta roots are created equal. There is actually a wide diversity in root types traceable back to the parental species, (isn’t genetics wonderful?). H. sieboldiana roots are large, (really more like fat), and seem sort of “woody”. H. longipes and H. kikutii hybrids have very long but few roots. The best roots of all from the shipper’s perspective are from H. yingeri heritage.  They become completely clean and pearly white with just one swish in the bucket. Fortunately for us, hostas that we frequently ship like ‘First Blush’^PP28,920 inherited these superb roots as have many of our yellow hostas with red petioles.

            Next time you open that box of special bare root hostas that arrives almost magically on one of those ubiquitous brown vans, take a minute and compare and contrast their roots, then plunge them into that waiting bucket of water. It might just be fun.   

Welcome. Hostas are supposed to be fun! But recently with the cancellation of Hosta College, local hosta club meetings, and now the AHS National Convention things have not been as much fun in Hostadom this spring as they should be. So, I thought we needed a new virtual place to meet while we “shelter in place” and take a break from puttering in our gardens. The Hosta Guru is what Erin, my new co-worker and head of our hosta liner division, and I came up with.

We intend to do a lot of wild and crazy things with this website. First, there will be a blog with my occasional thoughts and opinions about all things hosta. You can sign up to receive email notifications of the latest bit of wisdom that is posted, or you can just bookmark the site and visit when the urge hits you. No pressure, this site is just for fun. The blog posts will be short and sweet, a glimpse into my little corner of Hostadom.

But there will be more, somethings we already have thought of and some we will figure out as we go. There will be special hostas, like those I obtained from Japan and other limited-edition introductions, that will be exhibited and might even be offered exclusively by The Hosta Guru, a little virtual vending. If we can figure out how to produce a two-minute video that is entertaining, we may do that, too. I might even pull the curtain back and let you see some of what it takes to do all the magic that we make with hostas. And that is just the beginning. I hope you have as much fun with this as I intend to.

On to Blog 1. Our blue hostas are magnificent this April. The wax is really flowing. I think it is those cool, bright, windy days that really encourages white wax production. As the hostas are subjected to greater and greater desiccation stress, (wind speed is a squared function in the desiccation equation), they happily make a deep coating of wax that even the deluges from our severe thunderstorms and hail cannot wash off. The cool temperatures probably allow for higher photosynthetic rates and increased wax production, too.

Here is a look at my favorite blue seedling this spring. It is from the ‘Plum Pudding’ line, a F2. I just love to look down into the funnel of purple that the petioles form on these broad, ruffled upright leaves, all softened by the white of a heavy coating of wax. It makes you stop and smile. No, it does not have a name, so don’t ask. It may never see the bottom of a test tube in the TC lab, but in the evening, in the company of an adult beverage or two, it is a joy to behold.

Are you having fun yet?