Hosta Sports

There are all kinds of websites devoted to Hosta Sports on the Internet. Hosta Sports is simply another term for Hosta cultivars, which have become one of the fastest growing passions of gardeners partly because it is so easy to create hosta tissue cultures and collect pollen from these hardy shade-loving plants.A love for hosta sports is a relatively recent phenomenon, having only taken off as a gardening hobby in the past decade.

Like all cultivars, hosta sports often begin with some kind of native hosta variety. The native in North America are originally particular to prairie lands and have been grown on this continent for about a 150 years. Many of them were originally transported here from Korea, China and Japan.

Currently there are over four thousand varieties of hostas available on the market. Of these probably 500 can be considered to be stable varieties that won't come and go. The hybrids that are developed that do come and go are called sports. Thanks to the popularity of the plant the number of hosta sports has risen incredibly and they are now sought after treasures on the Internet.

People collect hosta sports the same way they collect jewels. They look for the most exotic hybrid to add to their garden with the idea of creating an even more exotic hybrid from that.

A brief surf on the Internet also turned up a variety of interesting new hosta sports for 2007. These included the following described below.

The Hosta Hanky Panky which is a perversion of Hosta Striptease. This is a three-foot wide clump with dark green leaves surrounded by a wide decorative gold border. It also has violet flowers on top of two-inch stems.

The Hosta Harpoon is a special type of hosta that has won many awards for being the best new variegated leaf hosta. It is a two-inch wide clump of narrow, shiny green leaves with a narrow gold border. The purple flowers it boasts are on stems forty inches tall.

The Hosta Heartbeat is a miniature version of the Fortunei Auremarginata hosta which is famous for its rolled leaves that resemble rosebuds. The leaves are heart shaped and range from deep to olive green and are striped with a thin cream colored bordered. It bears lavender colored flowers on twenty-inch tall stems.

Hosta HI Ho Silver is a very unusual hosta sport that has razor thin long grass like leaves that are ruffled by a thin stripe of cream. The plant gives bloom to lavender flowers on top of two-foot stems.
One of the most gorgeous and most popular of the hosta sports is the Hosta High Society. It is a sport of the Hosta June. It has large heart shaped powder blue leaves with a central creamy gold stripe. They only grow to be about a foot wide and boast pale lavender flowers on top of eight-inch high flowers.