When Hank and I bought our farm on Locust Hill in 1962 we had a squatter living on the property. He'd built himself a small tar-paper shack a few hundred yards from the road and had been living in it for many years. He had a woodstove for heat and cooking, a gravity-fed water system, but few other amenities, not even electricity.
We didn't mind having a squatter living half-way down the hill. Ivan was very bright, amazingly well-read and had merely chosen to lead a simple life, far from the madding crowd. He kept a vegetable garden, mowed the little lawn around the shack and was very tidy. He rarely came up to the house except once or twice a year to buy a jug of kerosene.
Although he drank a bit too much, Ivan was a tireless worker when sober. He could dig a trench with sides as straight and clean as a knife, or build a stone wall that would last for years. He lived contentedly in his little shack right up until he died in August of 1985. He's been gone for almost 20 years now, but we still miss him.
Being an old scrounge, it wasn't long after Ivan went to the great beyond that I was down at the shack digging up his daffodils and harvesting that summer's tomatoes and transplanting pieces of his forsythia bush.. The planting of funkia around the shack I left behind, having a strong aversion to anything with such an unattractive name. Of course most gardeners call these adaptable plants hostas, but my vocabulary contains all too many words from another era - icebox, Victrola, sneakers.
A few years later I saw a handsome bed of funkia in a friend's garden and learned to say hostas. I'd been pondering what to plant as a border beside the stone steps leading down to the pond, an area shaded for half the day by the front yard's large sugar maple, and decided hostas would be just the thing. Ivan's hostas were the variety with white-edged leaves, Hosta decorate, and despite having to fight a jungle of weeds, were still alive.
After a bit of searching I managed to locate five plants. They were pretty small, but just fine for someone who begrudges paying for a healthy hosta in a pot at the local nursery. I planted them, spaced four feet apart, beside the stone stairs, and hoped they'd soon fill in enough to eliminate having to weed-eat that edge of the lawn.
Hostas are easy-care perennials and do particularly well in shady areas. Until a few years ago, new varieties were expensive because, like most members of the lily family, they could only be grown from seed or division. Nowadays they are reproduced through cloning, one tiny bit of tissue grown in a laboratory soon parenting hundreds of identical offspring.
Hosta flowers can be lavender, mauve or white and are anything but showy, in fact once they've bloomed, their stalks are unattractive and are best cut down. The plants are mainly grown for their foliage. Their leaves are lance-shaped or oval or heart-shaped, some no bigger than an inch, others as large as dinner plates. Their texture may be smooth, ribbed or puckered. Every green in Mother Nature's color book can be found in one variety or another, plus blues, grays and yellows.
These perennials like lots of compost mixed into their soil to hold moisture. Although I added compost when I planted mine, they had a tough time getting started as the maple tree's roots sucked up most of the available water. Eventually they did fill in and made a nice green and white border by the steps. This spring, however, I was horrified to discover that over the winter almost all of them had suddenly succumbed.
Dead hostas? Growing these hardy perennials should be as easy for the gardener as cooking a baked potato is for the cook. Well, it was a weird winter. Every gardener I know had unexpected deaths in the garden this spring, as well as some spectacularly beautiful surprises. Mother Nature likes to keep us on our toes.
Since I'm not quite as penny-pinching as I was back in 1985, I decided to buy new plants to replace the ones that had died. Other garden projects came first though - the vegetable garden, annuals for the border, a few new perennials. By the time I went looking for my replacement hostas, I couldn't find any of the white-edged variety. About five new little hosta seedlings, however, had appeared beside the stairs, so I dug them up and spaced them properly. I knew it would probably be a few years before they turned into a full attractive planting, but I liked the idea of having the children of Ivan's hostas.
What I don't like is the fact that they are still so small they could hardly be seen in the photograph I took of the staircase. I ended up driving all over town looking for that same white-edged variety so I'd have a photo. I found all too many standard hostas, their blossomless stems waving in the air, plus some blues and even some with yellow, and then finally the right ones growing right down the road at George Ford's house.
Hopefully mine will be that big and full in a year or two.
