Little blue flowers Ageratum 'Artist Blue' - white flower Osteospernum 'Margarita  White' - yellow and red flowers Gerbera jamesonii 'Meg Revolution'and Hosta 'Coast to Coast' 8 May 2022

A Mother’s Day tradition that my Rosemary and I indulged in every year was going to the UBC plant sale on Mother’s Day Sunday.  By the time the pandemic hit these plant sales disappeared and after Rosemary died on December 9 2020 I stopped going to VanDusen Botanical Garden and the one at UBC. I did not have the heart to go.

But since then I have done my best to keep Rosemary’s garden (now mine) going with many of the plants that she liked, even annuals. I have the old plant labels so I try to replace the ones that have died.

Today is Mother’s Day and somehow I had forgotten about our plant sale tradition. The Topanga Café on 4^th Avenue near Macdonald burned to the ground a couple of years ago. To my pleasant surprise I noticed that a nursery has taken over the two lots.

I decided to bike there and managed to put most of the plants  bought in the basket  and rode back with a remaining plant in my right hand.

One of my purchases was a yellow hosta called ‘Coast to Coast’. Why did I buy a hosta that is going to grow very big? For one thing my daughter Alexandra will surely have space for it in her one acre Lillooet garden.

But I had another motive, a most pleasant one. The hosta, probably coming directly from a warm greenhouse, has a scape (a flower stalk in hosta nomenclature) and it will probably bloom before June when most hostas do so.  This means that when I make my presentation at the American Hosta Society’s National Convention in Minneapolis (8 June to 11 June) on the beauty of hosta flowers I will have a 2022 flower to show off. This hosta came from Walter’s Gardens in Zeeland, Michigan. My friend  C.H. (Clarence) Falstad works there. He is in charge of propagation and plant patents. I am sure that when I project a scan of this hosta’s flowers that he will be sure to smile.

In Praise of Hosta Flowers

Coincidence or not, in this pleasant sunny day, somehow I am celebrating Mother’s Day just right and keeping a tradition alive.

In spirit Rosemary was with me today and is with me now.

A bonus to be noticed is that the yellow Gerbera daisy is a double flower.