ahhh... very pretty, the first one is really nice! where do you have all these plants hidden in your garden? LOL Guess they aren't in the back yard, huh? I was just remembering the pics of your back yard from the other day.-Jessica

To me I tend to go for total plant volume over strictly counting eyes, but it sort of depends on the particular plant. In this case two larger eyes would be the winner to me over any number of small eyes. Sometimes when a hosta is stressed out it will overcompensate and put out a ton of eyes. On a large hosta like Blue Hawaii it should be multiplying fairly slowly, with the eyes getting fatter and fatter before putting out new ones. If one has a bunch of eyes I bet there is something going on with the crown, either some kind of rot or some other kind of damage that happened to it along the way. In time the larger eyes will multiply naturally on their own over a bunch of small ones and will often be the larger and more robust and mature looking plant quicker than a bunch of small ones. I think of it as quality vs quantity. On the other hand if it is a fast multiplying plant then more eyes would be the way to go over a couple larger ones as they will catch up to the larger ones quick enough. The other question I get asked sometimes is if you have nothing but single eye plants and some are flowering but others are not, which one do you pick? The flowering one will appear to put lots of energy into the flower and won't send up any more leaves from that eye but the one that isn't flowering will continue to flush out new leaves so may seem the better choice. To me, however, I would take the flowering one because after it flowers it will work on setting new dormant buds which become more eyes next year. It won't do much this summer but next year it will be larger than the singles that didn't flower this year. Just my take on it :) Chris

Reminds me of a scene a few winters ago at a heated birdbath where a Red-bellied Woodpecker was facing five starlings. When the count got up to eight starlings, the woodpecker quietly slipped away, and the starlings partied! Claire

Yes, and they also need a lot of new branches (ramification). The idea of bonsai is to give the appearance of age in a small size, so that means a thick, tapered trunk and a lot of branches with short internodes. Note that on yours the distance between nodes down low is short, but near the top they are getting long. If planted in the ground it will grow faster, and you can develop more branching and some shape with directional pruning. When you get a long one like the upper left in pic 1, cut back to just above the lower node for a sprout there in spring. You can help thicken the trunk by plating outside but with a dinner plate or tile a few inches under the roots, forcing them to go farther out radially to the sides, and making the base wider.http://www.bonsai4me.com/AdvTech/ATfieldgrowing.htm