I picked my niece Nev up from violin camp at Butler University last week — she enjoyed it, but was tuckered out.
I understand. I just returned from an “adult camp” called the American Hosta Society National Convention. It was a four-day sold-out event in Green Bay, Wisconsin. My buddies Tony, Curtis, Janet, Carol and I toured five private gardens Wednesday, four gardens Friday, six gardens Saturday and an antique store. On our way home, we may have shopped at Pondside Gardens where they have thousands of mature hosta specimen, in addition to their retail garden center.
And somehow, we squeezed in an hour at the Bay Beach Amusement Park riding the Zippin Pippin wooden rollercoaster, bumper cars and Falling Star. Tickets were 25 cents each and most rides only took two to three tickets.
Although it rained incessantly until Saturday and was 20 degrees colder than Indiana, it was perfect conditions to tour 15 unique gardens and celebrate the 51st annual convention. I estimate that nestled in among thousands of colorful perennials, unique trees and bonsai were close to 10,000 hostas.
One of my favorite aspects of private garden tours is to see the personality of the gardeners overflowing into their landscape design.
Herb and Gladie King noted that they virtually live in their gardens as playing in their “yarden” is their favorite pastime and keeps them young at heart, they said. Herb has been hybridizing hosta for more than twenty years — more than 400 of his original hostas are named while hundreds more are still under evaluation. A few things I learned:
Many of the dwarf ginkgo trees that are in pots are brought into their unheated garage for the winter.
Green Bay Botanical Gardens is home to the King Shade Garden, featuring many of Herb and Gladie King’s unique hostas.
They have no irrigation, but have a very, high water table.
Gladys uses an app called Skitch to capture her garden and annotate her plant names and locations.
Karen and Carl Vanden Heuvel have a two-acre garden filled with over 500 hosta varieties, as well as 800 tons of stones featured in their quarry garden feature complete with a pond of koi. Carl’s metalwork can be seen throughout: a handmade copper dome, a fountain made of huge metal recycled lamp domes, three waist-high metal garden balls — made from welding together the ends of two 500-gallon propane fuel tanks. Karen’s stained-glass art mixed with intricate metal grids enhances numerous garden areas, in addition to the in-home original stained-glass lamp design she creates.
I have a new list of hosta and complimentary perennials on my wish-list. But I just calculated that I must live to be 168 if I want my gardens to look like the Kings’ or Vanden Heuvels’.
