In this the age of instant communication, my daughter who lives in the interior British Columbia town of Lillooet, has only one way to leave town (for example to visit us in Vancouver) and this is with her SUV.

In his wisdom, former BC Premier, Gordon Campbell sold BC Rail to CNN. They almost instantly dissolved train service to the interior. Lillooet has a lovely train station. The train never stops there and Greyhound and other bus companies ended their service, too.

For bad medical problems citizens of Lillooet have the choice of driving (or being driven) to the bigger Kamloops or to Vancouver.

And there is something else. My daughter Ale is renovating her house that sits almost on a one acre piece of land. She was going to re-floor it when she realized that any company that had the adequate material would not ship to Lillooet. Ale bought her flooring ( a metric ton of it) at Windsor Plywood in Chilliwack.

Enter here into this story, her 78-year-old father, who volunteered to drive a large truck with the flooring. Fortunately going, I had the pleasure of my younger daughter Hilary who wanted to spend a week with her sister. With both of us wearing our facemasks we drove by Canada Highway 1 to Chilliwack, then past Hope and then took the turn off to Lytton. From Lytton there is curvy road to Lillooet. I managed, as I did, driving back the same way on my own.

Lytton (vies with Lillooet as the hottest place in Canada in the summer) has a special significance for me:

The Blood Mixes Inside my Heart 

Kevin Loring 

The Pleasure of Seeing Her Again 
Stopping a train at Cisco Bridge

In Lillooet we found Ale in the midst of removing the old carpeting with her deft assistants Kio and Makiyah. They unloaded the flooring and some plants my Rosemary had sent along. By the time we had taken a portrait of all of us with the Dodge Ram, my Rosemary had already nagged that we take the photograph.

I sat with my two daughters for an hour and a half. I marvelled at that bond that sisters have that I will never understand and enjoy. But knowing that it exists and being aware of my enjoyment is what counts.

I drove home enjoying the hot (30 Celsius) air and I had plenty of time to count my chickens and to realize how lucky I am.

Perhaps the one action that makes us human and may differentiate us from the “lower” orders is that we have an urge to name things, animals and fellow humans. It is as close as we can to play God.

This is particular the case in the world of living things as put in modern order by Linnaeus.

In botany plants have been classified and then named by all kinds of rules that are in effect. But these rules do not prevent humans from feeling romantic, philosophic, humorous or whimsical in naming plants, particularly when they are hybridizers or plant hunters.

Until recently the names of plants usually were the names of people who may have first found these plants in the wild. An example would be Hosta fortunei named after plant finder Robert Fortune (he who smuggled Chinese tea plants, Camellia sinensis out of China into India and the rest is history). When these plants were grown in nurseries, some of them were named after wives, offspring, musicians or actors (and actresses) of fame. Sometimes like in Rosa ‘Julia Child’ fame was accrued to a cook (chef?).

In the hosta world many of the named cultivars are romantic or poetic. Consider Hosta ‘August Moon’. But I the late 90s one man, Tony Avent successfully broke that mould. He began by demystifying plant hybridization by saying that he could do this while sitting on his truck eating a MacDonald’s hamburger.  He then introduced hostas with names like ‘Elvis Lives’, ‘Bubba’(having a short and red neck) and then proceeded to make sure his hosta would be the first in any hosta catalogue by calling one ‘Abba Dabba Doo’.

Tony Avent

He may not have been as original as he thought he was. In my garden I have Rosa ‘Zephirine Drouhin’. It is a lovely rose with no thorns and, yes, the first one in most rose catalogues particularly if they list Old Roses or Bourbon Roses.

'Zephirine Drouhin' or 'Zéphirine Drouhin' is a Bourbon rose, noted for being thornless, created in 1868 by the French rose grower Bizot, supposed to have been named after the wife of a rose enthusiast from Semur-en-Auxois (Côte-d'Or).

Rosa 'Zephirine Druhin' & Hosta fortunei 'Albopicta' 22 June 2020

When I say the rose in bloom today I could not resist! The hosta leaf may not look like Abba Dabba Doo because in our deck garden it gets little sun.

The end of June marks the time when our once-blooming roses are long gone and the remontant ones are at rest until a month from now.

So I look at our hostas with renewed interest and find solace during this pandemic to see which ones I can justify to scan for fun.

While I am no garden expert or botanical guru I can assert an almost universal idea that hostas are the white-mice of the plant kingdom.

We know that plants that are found in the wild are called species plants. We know that if we bring in those plants into a nursery or garden and tinker with them they produce what is commonly called a cultivar. These cultivars, sometimes when planted in mass, with some observation, a gardener with an eye for detail might notice one or two with a mutation. Perhaps it is a rose with more scent than the one next to it. With hostas it is easier to discern a wider white edge or a bluer version of a blue hosta next to it.

Hosta Áutum Frost' 22 May 2020

The next step is to select these and grow them separately. They will sometimes then produce offspring, in some cases through tissue culture cloning.

In the case of the Hosta ‘Halcyon’ which I wrote about here it took a human being (Eric Smith) to mix the pollen of two plants that normally did not flower at the same time.

 

Eric Smith and Halcyon

In the hosta world, these plants that are mutations of species and selected or hybridized, are called sports. One of the most famous sports in recent hosta memory is Hosta ‘June’ which is a sport of Hosta ‘Halcyon’.

There are other ways that hostas in particular can be nudged (forced?) to sport. Some of these methods (believe it or not) involve spraying a whole row of identical hostas with herbicide in spring and noting the ones that survive. There are also rumours in the hosta world of the use of the microwave to initiate sporting!

Rosa 'La Belle Sultane'' &  Hosta 'Autumn Frost' 16 June 2020

A lovely sport of Hosta ‘Halcyon’ is Hosta ‘First Frost’. As in my scan of some of its leaves you might note its wonderful instability and propensity to go like the Enterprise to uncharted areas.

A sport of the sport, Hosta ‘First Frost’ has a wider margin than its parent. When I saw a First Frost in one of my local nurseries I chose one that had a wider white margin. It was yellow when I saw it and not at this date the yellow has become an almost startling white.

In this day of rapid change it is somewhat comforting to see plants that abide with the times.

Hosta 'First Frost' July 26 2017