My Story
I have been gardening for almost 40 years and my passion grew so much in the early years that my thirst for plant knowledge exploded. I joined several gardening societies and associations, served as a director on several boards, attended almost every lecture related to gardening being offered in Toronto, subscribed to every gardening magazine, and watched every gardening TV show. I obtained my Horticultural Certificate through the University of Guelph many years ago and attended Landscape Architecture night classes at Ryerson. I subsequently earned my Master Gardeners designation and volunteered with the Toronto Botanical Gardens for a period of time. I have propagated all kinds of plants in various ways; started seeds, rooted cuttings and even started ferns from spores. I’ve been fortunate enough to win a few city awards for my front garden. I continue to seek out new nurseries and garden centres, go on garden tours in and around the city and visit botanical gardens wherever I travel. My love of gardening continues to run deep.
I can’t recall when exactly I made the leap from a regular mixed perennial garden to one more focused on hostas but I do remember my many visits to the now permanently closed Humber Nurseries. I loved those visits. Such a massive variety of every plant imaginable. It was during those visits that I discovered their hosta section. I would slowly stroll up and down the aisles admiring the different plants, and would be drawn to one or two particularly fancy hostas that I’d buy. I’d return home and plop them into a shady spot in my garden. Over time, the tags that accompanied the plants, haphazardly pushed into the soil near the plant, would crack and fade and eventually disappear making immediate identification impossible. I never gave it much thought really. My garden back then was quite eclectic.
As the shade in my garden increased because of the surrounding tree canopies, I needed to reduce my unhappy sun lovers in favour of plants that would thrive in the shade. Raising a family, paying a mortgage, car payments, and having other countless bills I didn’t have much in the way of disposable income but I desperately needed a lot more shade plants. Somewhere I saw an ad for cheap hostas. I needed a lot to fill a new garden bed so I went to have a look. The hostas were ordinary, the old common varieties like aureo margianata, fortunei aureomarginata, elegans and royal standard but they were robust and healthy and inexpensive. I think I spent $25, which was a lot for me at the time but those hostas were vigorous and quickly formed huge clumps that I divided every year making it possible to fill the shady spots in a very short period of time. After several years I had more of those hostas than I knew what to do with. I shared them with family, friends and neighbours. I have since learned that hostas are known as the ‘friendship plant’ because of this sharing. But, honestly, aside from the handful of fancy looking hostas I purchased at Humber, those bargain plants became very boring. The beds weren’t exciting and I grew tired of them.
Family raised, mortgage paid, equalled more plant money! I visited various nurseries and would pick up a few new hostas each year replacing the boring ones with ones that had a little more pizazz. I still wasn’t doing a good job keeping track of their names. I think when I purchased the same plant a few times I realised that I really needed to start keeping track. It was a costly mistake not to do so. I now had enough hostas and an interest in buying more pretty fancy ones that I realised it was not only time to keep track of what I had in the garden, I also needed to identify everything I currently had. This was an arduous task. There are thousands of varieties of hostas, as I discovered during this process!
I knew there were different sizes of hostas; extra-large, large, medium and small but I didn’t immediately appreciate that there was such a thing as minis. Itsy bitsy marvelous hostas growing less than 6” tall and wide. I had one in my garden purchased ages ago. I had neglected this tiny plant in a corner of a bed until one day I took a good long look at it because I intended to find out its name. It was very small, less than 3” tall and super cute. Fairy like. It was Tiny Tears.
During the identification pursuit of Tiny Tears, I became fascinated with the minis. There weren’t many around at the nurseries, if any at all, but over the course of several years I managed to find and purchase more minis until I amassed a small collection. It became clear that I needed a proper bed to display them because they got lost amongst the other larger hostas. I totally revamped my beds and dedicated a large area for my minis. Bed ready, I was now in hot pursuit of more minis. There were a number of hosta suppliers in southern Ontario where I found exciting little plants to join my growing collection but sadly most of these folks have now retired and shuttered their doors. As my collection has grown and the sources have shrunk, it is a challenge to locate varieties that I don’t have. I currently have over 50 small hostas and almost 100 minis with a large number of new ones on the way. This is nowhere near what’s out there, somewhere, and I want more. The hunt is on.
This is where the real collecting begins. When you’ve exhausted the easy finds, it’s the pursuit of the illusive, the rare, the difficult to find minis. It is the minis that people have in their personal collection who are willing to trade or sell privately that I now seek. It is the minis that must be purchased and imported, at an expense, from a foreign country. I will from time to time allow myself this little indulgence. This is where the excitement builds and the rush happens. It’s the moment you land a new one, update your list, prepare the label and it joins your other babies. You stand back and your eyes dance across the tiny tapestry of colour and texture with admiration and pride. If not for the private collector, so many varieties would be lost forever. I am an itsy bitsy hostaholic!
I know I am not alone in my passion and suspect you are too if you’ve read this far.
