My Favorite Plant by Jamaica Kincaid

Author:Jamaica Kincaid
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Picador

Hostas

BY TONY AVENT

ONE OF MY EARLIEST RECOLLECTIONS is growing up with hostas in the garden. It didn’t seem to matter how many times I rode my bicycle through those clumps along the driveway, they kept coming back … Indeed, they proved tougher than I. Little did I know that the plants I tried to destroy as a kid would become my lifelong addiction.

Of all the people who have grown hostas for years, there are always those who believe there are exactly two varieties: the green and the variegated. I vaguely believed this, too, until at the ripe old age of nine my folks took me to Raleigh to visit the nationally renowned home gardener Jim Cooper. This person was really strange, I thought, since he grew over fifty different varieties of hosta, which in 1966—in the days before every gardener was a breeder—even I knew was a lot. Of course, at age nine, a garden big enough to run and jump in thrilled me more than the hostas growing in it, but still, I couldn’t get them out of my mind.

Each successive trip to Cooper’s garden found me spending more time with notepad in hand, slowly walking around the beds trying to memorize all the hosta names (having already mastered the states and their capitals). Being a generous sort, and the unofficial ambassador of hosta, Cooper was always free with a division of anything that struck my fancy, although I was aghast when he told me that some hostas cost as much as $100 per plant. Should I call the mental hospital, I secretly wondered, or do other people find it natural to spend an entire car payment on one plant?

My first hosta was the common variegated kind, ‘Undulata.’ It is tough as nails, divides easily, grows fast, but it sure is ugly! I don’t know why anyone would ever buy another hosta after growing this dog. Okay, in spring it looks great as it emerges from its winter sleep, but it picks up ugly again pretty quickly. Even the flowers are so ugly that I was taught from an early age to run and cut them as soon as I saw the bloom stalks forming. I figured it must be like looking at Medusa’s head. If I caught a glimpse of a hosta flower, I would turn into something horrible … like a kudzu vine.

There were several different H. ‘Undulata’ type hostas or subvarieties on the market, and being a collector wannabe, I searched for them all. There was an all-green one called ‘Undulata Erromena’ … the “undulata mistake.” Then came ‘Undulata variegata’ and ‘Undulata Univittata,’ and ‘Undulata White Ray,’ all of which proved to be the same when grown under the same conditions. Only the attractive ‘Undulata Albomarginata’ turned out to be worth the trouble, and the rest were abandoned after a few years. I quickly realized that so-called collectors collected plant names and were not often interested in good garden plants.

I next moved on to the Hosta ‘Fortunei’ group, from which many of the truly good garden hostas have been derived.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.