May 2006

Several of last year's new Hosta acquisitions have been a very pleasant surprise in how they have come back this year. Almost all of them have shown great vigour and most are showing more than just one extra shoot off the main crown. Here we have 'Striptease' which has gone from a single shoot to five; four of them in a tight cluster and the fifth one off to the side.

I must admit to being very tempted to 'slice and dice' this one and probably will do just that.

One of the other ones showing great vigour is 'Revolution' with not only extra shoots but the size of the leaves is substantially bigger this year. The plant off to the right is a new root this year and it was supposed to be what it's planted beside: 'Revolution' but it is much more reminiscent of 'Morning Light', we'll wait and see how it fully colours up. Contents not matching label is an all too common occurence with bare roots unfortunately.

I didn't think we still had this dwarf Bearded Iris around, it's called 'Gold Canary'

This shoot on one of our Hosta 'Fortunei Hyacinthina' crowns has started to sport. We'll follow its development with great interest of course.

We have added several new colours of 'Nora Barlow' Colombines this spring. Not all have opened up as yet, matter of fact one or two are just now starting to bud up, but we're both very taken with the colours we have seen thus far.

A couple of the new ones are very dark in colour, this one here is almost maroon.

This one opened up to show a rich, dark purple, but when this and the one above were still in bud you could hardly tell they were going to be different colours.

The shoots off one of our Hostas that started to sport are 'trucking' right along. More and more leaves are showing streaking and one actually shows variegation now! It's all really quite exciting...

On the 28th of the month our 'Peach Pixie' lily was the first of this year's batch of lily flowers, handsomely beating out 'Lollypop'.