H. 'Invincible'

A new addition for us this year, 2008, obtained through a trade. Thanks Myrle!

Over the past couple of years I've been keen to add fragrant flowered Hostas to the mix. I realize that Hostas certainly offer a marvellous addition to the landscape by virtue of their foliage, but they DO flower and why not try and add additional fragrance to the scents we get during the course of the gardening season. So, it's only natural to try and add a mix of cultivars that do just that. 'Invincible' on top of that apparently also offers substance and in the haven for slugs we have on the We(s)t Coast that's a good thing!

It's a little early for some pictures, if for no other reason than that my not-so-trusty Olympus C5050 has given up the ghost once more for the second time in the 5 years I've owned it. Me thinks it's time for something else.

Defective cameras have a funny way of getting fixed when it's by far the least expensive option to get back into the picture taking game again. So it was with the Olympus and it's nice to be able to snap away again with reckless abandon.

This may not be the best angle, nor show off the plant too terribly well. One of the things you don't see with much emphasis, is the piecrusting the leaves can show. Hopefully that'll show better once the season wears on.

A few weeks later and the pie-crusting of the leaves shows rather nicely in this shot. Now let's keep our fingers crossed we'll see it flower this year....

For 2009 we divided one of the plants, one division went as a trade, the other was used as the center fill in a hanging basket with perennials. They're all showing good vigour and a couple of them are starting to put up scapes by early July.

I noticed a very peculiar looking flower on one of them a few days later. Although it's hard to tell in this picture where the flower attaches to the scape -virtually right at soil level- what you can readily see is the overall length of the flower, it's longer than some of the petioles!

We've noticed on a fair number of plants this year that unusual things are happening to the various aspects of blooming. Scapes on more then one Hosta are fasciated, flowers are contorted, and now this elongation here. There's no doubt a good deal of this can be traced back to late winter when we saw several days of higher temperatures followed by very low night time temperatures. The temperature swing would have been quite large for quite a few of our Hosta, some of which would have been at daytime temperatures of around 20°C or even more and then the nighttime one would have been just above freezing. If this happens at a point when the meristem is developing it can lead to these strange blooming things we now see.

While the leaves feel to have decent substance to them, the plant has a reputation for being a slug-magnet. Perhaps not as bad as others in the yard, certainly this mid-August 2011 shot shows plenty of slug damage to the leaves of the main plant we have.

Looks like this plant is outgrowing its 2-gallon home, time for up-potting!

There is more information about this cultivar in Hugo's Database.

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Pages last updated 28 November 2018
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