My father’s fascination with things of the earth, which (if you’ll pardon the pun) took root as a farmboy in Ireland, has continued in all the years he’s lived in the United States, but somehow it never became part of
my genetic inheritance.
That is, until I got a Coolpix camera, started experimenting with outdoor shots, and noticed how readers of my blog—heck, even
I—responded to shots of flora and fauna.
I was especially taken with the image accompanying this post, which I took while on vacation two weeks ago at the
Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York. Still, I had a bit of a problem: I couldn’t name this rather exotic-looking plant.
For help, I turned to another visitor at my inn, who had struck me as unbelievably knowledgeable about everything associated with the place.
Sure enough, she didn’t disappoint me.
“Oh, that’s a giant hosta,” she said matter-of-factly.
“A giant
what????” I asked, not trusting my ears.
She helpfully spelled out the name of the plant.
A
giant hosta? From the image staring out from my camera, it looked to me more like the hosta that ate Chautauqua—no, make that
the entire southwest corner of New York State. It summoned memories of the talking and singing plant of
Little Shop of Horrors (in the baritone of Motown’s Levi Stubbs), pleading with hapless Rick Moranis with an urgency not even heard on the Four Tops singer's peerless “Reach Out” or “Bernadette”: “Feed me, Seymour!”
For some reason, I have always felt drawn to the unusual
shape of the hosta, and in the garden given over to this at the New Jersey State Botanical Garden at Skylands, I found sizes ranging from miniature to giant. (It’s hard to
believe that this shade-loving perennial was not a commonly found plant in the U.S.40
years ago.)
