Just got my issue of The Hosta Journal from the American Hosta Society (AHS) and a copy of the Registrations 2008 pamphlet. If you think you have come up with a notable new hosta cultivar, you need to register it with the AHS in order to get credit for your accomplishment. If it goes on to become a classic in the hosta world, you will be forever given credit for being the one who introduced it. If it is just another big, blue hosta with little to distinguish it from the other 50 or so, you will still get credit but, perhaps, not fame.
Kevin Walek, the current International Registrar of the Genus Hosta, says that he registered about 150 new cultivars during 2008. This brings the total number of different registered hostas to 3,940. I feel comfortable identifying maybe 50 or so and I always wonder if there are really people who can tell the difference between many of them that vary so little from each other.
There are several characteristics that may vary on a hosta. If one trait is unique, you can name a new cultivar. If the number of parallel veins is different from hostas of similar color and size, you could name a new one. If the plant flowers in a different season from the others of its kind, you could name it. So, if you see seven large blue hostas in a garden and they each have a different name on the stake next to them, it may be something as simple as having a fragrant flower or a dark lavender versus a light lavender bloom that makes the difference. To the average person, they remain just a bunch of big, blue hostas.
At times, I have had as many as 400 cultivars of hosta in my garden. I am not a collector but the numbers just seemed to keep rising as I visited nurseries and went to American Hosta Society confereces around the country.(BTW- The next one is in Michigan in late June, 2009) They always have a vendor's room and it is difficult to pass through it without bending to the urge to add "just one or two" more cultivars to the home garden.
One of the things on my ever expanding "to do" list is to try to come up with a list of perhaps 50 cultivars which would meet all the needs of the average gardener. By this I mean that hostas like any other plant help to meet certain aspects of your design. You may use them for their variegated foliage or for texture changes or for flower color or for a number of other reasons. Surely, we could find a small number of the nearly 4,000 available that would meet the needs of a non-hosta person's garden. They would only need one big blue one and one small green one and one blue with cream colored margin, etc.
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Mr PGC
