Oh wow are you bringing up recent memories!! If you search this forum you'll find the post about me freaking out over my husband being transferred and our mid-winter move 500 miles away!! I had ten years invested in my gardens and the idea of leaving my babies behind -no way!! It ended up that about one third to half the plants survived the move. Thanks to a twist of fate I was able to get one more quick digging opportunity last summer to rescue a few more from ... Roundup. Everybody thought I was crazy too and I cared less. My favorites from my rock collection came too. And when I landed here not knowing a soul without my friends and family it was a HUGE comfort to see my green friends putting up their brave little shoots that spring!! One thing I would do over if I could. While I did have lots of photos of my gardens, I would make a journal of every plant in each garden. That way it is far easier to replace the ones who don't survive, get misplaced, etc. This is the third summer here and I am once again happily surrounded by quite a few Hosta. I'm still moving them to permanent locations. It's a good thing:)y

That is a fairly common Hosta also; watch craigslist or look around and I bet you will find more. Once in a while I find a huge mature hosta, normally in one of the common ones like that one that someone just doesn't want, I usually pay $5 or $10 at the most for a large common hosta. That one (Undulata Albomarginata) grows pretty fast also. I have a hosta, I'm pretty sure it is Undulata Albomarginata sitting in a neglected area back by my rabbits, only half buried, and I swear it about doubled in size sine last summer. If they look too crappy, you can always cut them down and wait till next year. I'd wait till later in the summer though before you chop them, they do need to store up some energy. I mowed over about 30 hosta last year some time in August because I didn't like the weeds and grass growing around them and was too lazy to do anything else. They came back just fine this year. Also; try other varieties, some are much more pest resistant than others. Jamie

Bernd- You have a point there. Too many new introductions are being marketed and sold w/o having been grown to maturity. A cool looking tc sport or seedling grows for 2 or 3 years and shazzam, get it out and sell it. Once I took the time to read thru the AHS "New Registrations" booklet only to discover that in some of the descriptions, it would say 3 yr. old seedling, or a sport that was discovered a year ago. No one knows how it will perform in backyards under different growing conditions. I rather enjoy some of the rattier photos of some hostas. It shows me how one will look under under different growing conditions. Carol Brasher used to take the photos for Mary Chastain's old website. Every one of them looked breathtaking. I bought a bunch and some were indeed beautiful, but not all. Sometime I get totally taken in by a leaf photo, only to not like the plant in more or less shade/sun. I wish one couldn't register or market a hosta that hadn't been grown out for 5 years, But I am dreaming again. Thanks BOB for all your diligent efforts in organizing and keeping up your fabulous resource The Hosta Library. -Babka

Jo when you started with hostas and put the "67" after your name, it was a mere blip in time, how long did that last, maybe one week? and you were headed for 100 if I recall correctly. And that may work for you. You have an active life, but you are also compulsive about maintaining your hosta records. Am I right or not? HA,.....I thought so. Now I'm trying to break that hierarchical habit I've had all my life, especially when I was a librarian before I discovered boats and computers. So I like KEY WORDS or TAGS which is so simple a term even the youte of today can understand it. And I am trying to have my files this year posted on Flickr with tags before they upload, but all on my computer or CLOUD are organized by camera file name, by date, and with all sorts of tags--except the ones I need to search with like "gold" or "Solberg" or whatever lets me find it in response to someone's question on this forum. In the end, we all have to know WHICH hosta fulfill certain attributes. I don't rely on an outside service (like Flickr) to be a forever solution to my photos. OH no. I went through Webshots folding up and turning into an observer site only, lost my photos from there. Then I had an external harddrive fail on me. So I'm pretty concerned about keeping the pictures themselves. It's a fun thing for me. I can sit here and immerse myself in viewing the pictures I took, refresh the mental notes I made to myself about who was who when they had missing names. I'd check the past photos. It works for me. And that is one reason I take pictures with more than one hosta in them. If I lose the nametag, and I know who it's neighbor is, then I look for the picture of the known neighbor, and voila, I see who the would-be NOID is. That is also why I try to identify all the hosta in the photo too. Does anyone else watch their photos as a full screen slideshow? Do you say the names of the hosta before the slide changes? And for those you missed, do you go look at them next day to see who they are? Well, I do that. Seems to me you could put it on a manual slideshow, so you can play NAME THE HOSTA at your next club gathering, or your family gathering if everyone is into the garden thing. I'd play it. Lose, probably. Except where my own personal garden comes in. I'm getting much better. I think watching the slideshow helps a lot. Okay, now that really wasn't off topic was it? It simply says how I use my indexing. ;)