Hommel Mangas
I just returned from Ames, Iowa — host of the 2023 American Hosta Society Convention.
My nephew Drew, 10 and 3/4, started out his summer break by attending his sister’s two-hour Center Grove High School graduation. He noted that he learned that graduations are “very boring and miserable.” After one family’s child received his diploma, they blew a loud horn — Drew said, “That was funny!” He also added, “I think someone else had a kazoo or instrument that they blew — that was also funny because it was right after the horn.”
It’s the little things.
Drew has been out of school on summer break for 18 days, and his favorite day so far was riding four-wheelers on his great-grandparent’s Franklin farm last Saturday with his brother Isaac, cousin Emery, his dad, Chris, and Uncle David. The fifth-grader-to-be noted that a highlight was when they made a path that “dropped down into the creek and then rode back up the other side and half-circled around.”
The same morning that Drew and gang were loading up four-wheelers on the trailer, I left my Iowa hotel at 7 a.m. with some 300 garden buddies to tour some magnificent gardens, the main activity on the fourth day of the convention. I’ve had the blessing of serving on the American Hosta Society board as vice president of awards and honors the past four years, tasked with the fun job of giving out hybridizer, photography, hosta garden performance and convention leaf show and auction awards.
Earlier this week, Drew came over to help his Auntie Janet water and unload my CRV. As I was writing this, he was inspecting the property on our golf cart to make sure there are no new downed tree limbs. When he told me he liked the Cannova Red Golden Flame Canna, he also said he has a white flower that he likes. “I guess it might be weird that a guy has a flower.”
I shared that many of the hybridizers happen to be men. I then showed him my “river” of 25 Hosta Waterslides that were hybridized by my Michigan friend Hans Hansen — the dry hosta river lined by Indiana limestone rocks that Drew and I carried out of our field last year. Hansen is a head of the Walters Garden hybridizing team and first hybridized Asiatic lilies as an FFA student. Hansen has since given plant lovers new cultivars of hybridized baptisia, hosta, agave and more
Summer breaks give you time to think and dream.
Happy 11th birthday (on Monday) Drew!
Janet Hommel Mangas grew up on the east side of Greenwood. The Center Grove area resident and her husband are the parents of three daughters. Send comments to [email protected].
