Thoughts off the top of my head: November 2012
When I travel across the country to speak about hostas, I often stay with hosta folks that generously put me up in their homes. I enjoy seeing their gardens and talking hostas with them but also like learning about the other passions they have in their lives. Many frequently collect a variety of things not related to gardening at all. Others travel, enjoy hunting or fishing, or are talented enough to make jewelry or stained glass. Some are quilters. Most have a “hobby”.
For some of us hostas are our hobby, but for me it is my vocation. It is really who I am. I probably think about something related to hostas every day. I take no vacation from them. When I am on the road I am often asked if I have a hobby other than hostas. The truth is, I really do not have any other activity that I am really passionate about. I do collect a little pottery, C. C. Cole, but usually only when hosta folks visit who have a pottery problem, too.
Gardening in the South is a year round activity, not so in the North. In the South we try to have something in bloom in our shade gardens every month of the year. Edgeworthia and hellebores bloom in January followed by a multitude of little bulbs. Our pansies usually bloom all through the winter. Camellias, sasanqua in the fall and japonica in the winter, fill the garden with flowers from October to March. Northerners, on the other hand, put their gardens to bed in the fall and let them fill up with snow. That leaves almost half the year for some other passion.
Some hosta folks extend their hosta season by growing seeds indoors through the winter months. Hosta hybridizing with its pollination in the summer, seed collecting in the fall and seed growing in the winter and spring, has become a year round activity. Add in all the Internet chat, and hostas can almost eliminate the need for a winter hobby. But you can only spend so many hours a day watching those little fellows grow; so many hosta folks do a little something else as they wait for spring.
As I said before, some are quilters. I live in a quilting family. When the weather is nice gardening abounds, but quilts are year round. We often make the rounds to every quilt store we can find. I am the chauffeur and help a little with matching fabric colors, using my hosta trained eye, but I also usually have plenty of time just to look and think about the quilt business. You know the quilt business is a lot like the hosta business and you can get some good ideas by comparing them both.
Sewing a quilt is really just landscaping with fabric. It is art form. We use different colored hostas with varied texture and patterns to bring color to the shade garden. Gardens and quilts can be formal or a little crazy to reflect our own personalities. There are even landscape quilts and ones filled with applique flowers. It is only natural that those of us that grow hostas for their wonderful color combinations would be attracted to quilts.
Quilters make quilts but they would never buy enough fabric to keep all the quilt stores in business if they only bought the amount of fabric they needed to complete their projects. Yes, quilters are collectors, too, collectors of fabric. Each one has a “stash” of fabric that they just had to have while visiting some quilt shop several hundred miles from home. Yes, it may find its way into a quilt someday but that is not why it was purchased. It was purchased to join several other half yards, quarter yards, “fat quarters” and “jelly rolls” stashed in a very organized way in the sewing room or closet. Having a great stash, like having a great hosta collection, is an end in itself. (Fabric collections can be large! It folds neatly into little piles and requires no watering or weeding, maybe a little dusting and ironing, and purchasing it is much more guilt-free than hostas that occupy vast areas of real estate.)
Quilters, like gardeners are mostly women but I do think that there are more men growing hostas than men quilting, at least proportionally. It is probably the social nature of quilting. Women would gather and all help finish a quilt when they were all hand quilted a century ago. They would gather and socialize, have a quilting bee. Today most quilts are machine quilted on large computerized sewing machines but quit shops are still a place for women to gather and bond. Shade gardens however are frequently a place of solitude, of escape.
I doubt if a quilt shop could make a profit just by selling fabric, especially with the high inventory costs. (Hostas may require fertilizer and water, but they pay us back in added inventory; they make more divisions each year.) So quilt shops hold classes, another form of social gathering, some shops several a week. This not only encourages repeat business but also helps build a close relationship between the shop owner and her customers. There are “on your own” car and even bus tours too, “Shop Hops”, a day of collecting for your stash at all the area shops.
There is even an American Quilter’s Society. They have Quilt Shows, a magazine, and sources of fabric and patterns. Sound familiar. It does until you look at their website, www.americanquilter.com. Believe it or not, the quilting world is much larger than the hosta world. It is big business, all geared to the individual quilter. Quilt shops have thousands of bolts of fabric for sale. They offer sewing machines that sell for the price of a small automobile. They have advertising on the homepage of their website!!! Go to the website and then the AHS website, www.Hosta.org and see the difference.
As hosta folks we do a lot of things right. It is the things we do not do that hurt us the most. We are afraid to aggressively market hostas and the American Hosta Society. We are too “laid back”. We need to ramp up the excitement and spread the joy. Not everyone needs to own 600 hostas or hybridize 12 months a year but everyone needs to know how much fun hostas can be. We need to “talk” hostas more, not just hang out with our hosta friends.. So spread the word, and take a new friend hosta shopping this spring, or better yet, organize a tour of local shade gardens. I suggest you just go all out and attend Hosta College in March. I will be there with a few new hostas for your “stash” and we can plan some future hosta craziness that might just attract a crowd. Sounds like fun!
I wonder, have hostas become regionalized? Are there some that just can be found in the South and others just in New England? Have they been selected in those areas because they grow particularly well there? Are some hostas not offered for sale in some regions because they are nearly impossible to grow there? I wonder.
The AHS Benedict Garden Performance Awards would have you think so. Judging is regionally determined. Garden Performance Judges select hostas from a nominated list based on how well they grow in their region of the country. A hosta must get votes from multiple regions to be considered one that grows well, I guess, across the country. Don’t get me wrong, I do not want in any way to criticize the method in determining the Benedict Awards; I just wonder if hostas have become regionalized to the extent of say daylilies.
Those of you that are regular convention goers might have a good idea if regionalization has occurred in Hostadom. In the last two years the AHS and Midwest Conventions have been in New England, Nashville, TN, Madison, WI, and Rochester, MN. Did we find gardens filled with different hostas in each of these regions? Well, yes and no. There are special “local” hostas everywhere we go, ‘Vermont Frost’ in New England and ‘Tennessee Waltz’ in Nashville. They are usually plants sold by a local hosta specialist in that area. Other hostas also seem to be found in almost every garden on tour in one area and are present but rare in other regions.
While this might appear on the surface that the garden owners are selecting the best plants for their gardens, in reality it is probably that they are just buying most of their hostas from the same local hosta nurseries. They are buying local. We all like to buy hostas where ever we find them. Most of us will even place a few orders for hostas to be shipped to us in the spring so that we can have a few new and unusual plants each year. However, many of us buy most of our hostas from our friendly local hosta grower, visiting multiple times during the year.
Then, are local hosta nurseries selecting hostas for their inventories that they think will grow best in their local area thereby creating regionalization? Undoubtedly, they are, but maybe for selfish reasons. I know that I select hostas to sell locally that I think I can grow in my nursery. If I cannot grow them then I won’t sell them. Besides being frustrating, it is not profitable. A good example is ‘Rainforest Sunrise’. This is a beautiful hosta with the color combination that I know will sell easily. It is even a Hosta of the Year selection. Unfortunately, in the South it, like it’s parent ‘Maui Buttercups’ is highly susceptible to a fungal disease as early as mid-June. I would rather let someone else grow and sell these wonderful hostas that may not have this problem or is willing to spray every couple of weeks to prevent it. Therefore, ‘Rainforest Sunrise’ is more rare in gardens here than in the North.
There is also the other side of that coin, however. Hosta gardeners like to try to grow the difficult hostas, too. Hostas with a reputation for disappearing are a challenge and a measure of a hosta grower’s acumen. These are the hostas that hostaholics buy again and again, searching for just the right spot in the garden for success. I generally do not sell these hostas either, (although it would be profitable), not so much because they will not grow in North Carolina but that they are hard to grow anywhere. This is not really a case of regionalization.
One other word about hosta specialty nurseries, they all have their own idea of who they are and what type of inventory they want to have. There is a variety of profitable business models for selling hostas and some of that is determined by where they are. Some nurseries sell a few hundred tried and true hostas, some sell as many as they can. Some like me sell new introductions primarily, some sell new and old hostas. What they sell is based to some degree on what they can propagate or buy at a reasonable price as well as what they think they can easily sell. Their wholesale sources for hostas are not regional however, but produced by tissue culture labs in this country and as far away as Poland, Thailand and China.
Thus the primary source of hostas is global in nature. New hostas are distributed through large international businesses to your local hosta nursery. They sell hostas hybridized for Holland and Belgium, Michigan and Minnesota, Washington and Oregon, as well as New England and points south. If regionalization occurs it is at the local hosta nursery level, a hosta expert deciding not only what will grow well for him or her, but also what will sell quickly. Most, however, will take a chance on a “hot hosta”, even with a white leaf center.
I think hostas are starting to become regionalized. We get many new mail order customers for hostas from the South. It is the old idea, not so much true for hostas as other perennials, that local nurseries have plants that are better acclimated, and to some extent are selected to succeed in this part of the country. Hybridizers naturally select seedlings that grow well in their “home” region. But as we saw with the comparison to the quilt business, the hosta world is comparatively small and is probably best served by one single global distribution system.
Is this a good thing? Again, yes and no. Selecting and producing hostas for a single region of the country would result in locally better and easier to grow hostas. Home gardeners would have more success with hostas and probably collect more and more of them. The hosta market would increase, allowing more regionalization. This would be great for the local hosta grower but the whole world is soon to be run by the Internet or at least it will greatly affect how even the smallest hosta nursery runs its business. Globalization is not the future of hosta distribution; it has been the present for a century or more.
So find a hosta seller or three that you trust, that will be honest enough to tell you if the hosta you crave will be right for you. Convention vending is great for this but so is building a relationship with the local seller in your area. Visit them often and chat. Don’t be afraid to know the truth about that new hosta that is so uniquely different. If regionalization does occur, it will be the local hosta nurseries that make it so.
I think that the best of both worlds may be hosta growers that understand your growing conditions where ever you may garden and are committed to sell you hostas that will flourish for you. I like being asked how well a new hosta grows and where I think it might do best in your garden. I will try to talk you out of buying one that might struggle, too. For some of you great gardeners, though, if I say a hosta is difficult to grow then it suddenly becomes more attractive. So much for regionalization!