Hosta 'Antioch' 6 July 2023

With the news that my paragon of stability, Niño has cancer I am left with an empty house where his sister Niña is providing me with some solace. Niño will be back home on Friday and with proper care (very expensive) he will live comfortably for perhaps another year.

If anything this has made me more aware of how nothing can be taken for granted.

An example is Hosta ‘Antioch’ happily in a large pot at the entrance to my deck garden. I believe I may have purchased Antioch around 1988. 

Not wanting to take it for granted and remembering how much larger it was in our Kerrisdale garden where both Rosemary and I admired it, I looked at it today with a tad of sadness realizing how much of my stability is going out the window.

Because I have little left to do during the day I have been scanning my plants lots and putting them into double exterior hard drives knowing well it is all an exercise in futility. I must keep doing it simply because the process is fun and does give me a needed distraction.

I am unable to convince my friends of the America Hosta Society that to have generated over15,000 so called “different” cultivars is sort of shooting themselves on the foot. This old hosta is lovely and indeed it does look different and not like those many streaked hostas that seem to be identical and only and expert might tell the difference.

Rosemary is gone, Niño will (statistically) not survive me but I do get a degree of comfort of seeing Hosta ‘Antioch’ providing me with a presence of stability.