Oh yes! My girls and I often find terrific buys like that - we go to the nursery very early in March and come home w $1 Delphs and Lupines, for example and stand agape when it's flowering time! At end of the season for shrubs n trees! I have a dwarf Korean Lilac that I only paid $7 for that I love to talk about. Glad someone else out there that appreciates the potential and looks beyond the aesthetics sometimes. Double the pleasure!

Thank you all very much for the warm welcome to the forum! I knew that I will get help here. Ken, no you are not scary. I was not posting in the forum because I usually was able to find answer to my question in forum archives. But from now on I will participate in here more actively. I admire people's attitude and knowledge on the forum. Here in Sweden there is no Hosta Society and no place to discuss hostas. So I'm very glad to find enthusiastic group of hosta fans on the other side of the ocean. Chris, ademink, Corrine and Gesila, thank you for IDing my plant! Gesila, great photos, your plant looks exactly like mine. The same habit and coloring. Have to wait for the flowering to confirm the final ID. I have another question. When shall we have the hosta alphabet for year 2011? Alphabet threads are some of my favorites on the forum...

Esther, whoops! Sorry, somehow didn't see your response until now! Yes, I saw that other vendors of the dog tags also charge almost as much for shipping the second through gazillionth tag as they do the first, but I think that's because normally they probably aren't selling more than a couple or three at a time -- they're dog tags, and very few people have as many dogs as I have hostas! :) I think next time I'm going to contact the seller ahead of time and ask for cheaper shipping. It cost her $1.71 to ship my tags, and she charged me over $10 in shipping. That's ridiculous. However, I'm very happy with the tags themselves, and I probably will go back for more even if I have to keep paying that much in shipping because the tags look so good. I found some skewers that worked! I found these on Amazon and was able to bend them using pliers by laying them flat on my kitchen counter with the loop hanging over the edge, grasping them right up under the neck of the loop with the pliers, then bending up HARD. I'm scrawny and I could do it, so it would be a cinch for any man and probably most women. These skewers are flat, so I did need the loops that came with the tags, but I really love the finished product, and the skewers are 17" long so they can go deep into the ground and still stick up high enough to read easily without squatting. Here is a link that might be useful: skewers on Amazon

" Are you going to keep these new acquisitions potted, or test them for HVX? " Read my post again, Esther. I didn't buy any. "I have about all the variety they carry" But I probably bought them at big box stores! Did I keep them??? Yes. Did I test them? No. But I did drive my gas guzzling pick-up to get them, single-handedly destroying the planet and acquiring HVX all at the same time - a twofer. I don't give truck to either hysteria. And my beer of choice is Busch lite over ice with a shot of lime. Lite AND refreshing. Time to go to the cemetary to honor my lost brothers in arms. I hope no fleabag politicians are there.