Re: H. 'High Kicker'

 This is great!

Halcyon has always been one of my best sellers, but now that I can list
it a fragrant, per Bill Meyer, I should be able to sell a ton of them.
 Never noticed it myself, but who cares.

Chick

Bill Meyer wrote:

  Hi John,
        I suppose that information came from Aden, and I regard it as highly
  suspect. I met Aden and, well, some of his stories were more than a little
  unlikely. Most information from him should be taken with a grain of salt, or
  maybe a 5 lb. container of salt :-) I didn't know about Watanabe's booklet,
  though. His is the premier hosta nursery in Japan, so what he says may well
  be true. I see no reason to think it is impossible, or really even unlikely.
         When we think of hosta fragrance, we think of the distinctive scent
  of the plantagenia species. This scent is present in most of the named
  hybrids that include it in their backgrounds. I've heard people say that
  some of these have slightly different smells, but my nose isn't that good, I
  guess. To me they all smell pretty much the same, although some are more
  fragrant.
         I have noticed that several other hostas without plantagenia in their
  backgrounds
   have faint flower fragrances that are clearly different. Not all
  of these are pleasant smells, but they are not in any way similar to
  plantagenia. One of the pleasant ones is 'Halcyon' which smells somewhat
  like lilac. The smell is faint, and may be more noticeable on cool mornings.
  At times I can't smell it, but other times I've smelled it from 2-3 feet
  away. Another one with fragrance is one of the plants that was going around
  as rupifraga. I had brought it indoors in cool fall weather to use it for
  hybridizing and found it had a fairly strong burnt-rubber sort of smell that
  wasn't pleasant at all. I think I noticed a couple other faintly unpleasant
  smells among longipes seedlings. None of these plants had anything more than
  faint smells that only some people could smell at all even with the flowers
  held up to their noses.
                                                              ........Bill
  Meyer    

    In The Genus Hosta, Schmid describes H. 'High Kicker'  (Aden 87) as a  

  cross    

    of "H. pycnophylla fragrant x H. pycnophylla yellow."  Zilis in The Hosta
    Handbook simply writes: "hybrid of two H. pycnophylla forms."

    Is there really a fragrant variety of the species pycnophylla?  Is this
    available in the trade from anyone?

    Thanks,

    -John Christensen
    Ann Arbor, MI, Zone 5

    ---------------------------------------------------------------------
    To sign-off this list, send email to     majordomo@hort.net     with the
    message text UNSUBSCRIBE HOSTA-OPEN  

  ---------------------------------------------------------------------
  To sign-off this list, send email to   majordomo@hort.net   with the
  message text UNSUBSCRIBE HOSTA-OPEN

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To sign-off this list, send email to majordomo@hort.net with the
message text UNSUBSCRIBE HOSTA-OPEN
Other Mailing lists | Author Index | Date Index | Subject Index | Thread Index