Hostas At RBG

The foursome above had a well-received presentation at Olbrich Botanical Gardens (Madison, WI) last night for the Wisconsin Hardy Plant Society monthly meeting. I would guess we had about 150 in attendance and the night went well. From left to right are yours truly, Mark Konlock (Green Bay Botanical Gardens), Ed Lyon (Allen Centennial Gardens) and Jeff Epping (Olbrich Botanical Gardens). We had a nice dinner before the event and chatted about our challenges, 2013 plans, collections and certainly plants. Once the presentation started, we bounced the microphone around and described a lot of different plants with supporting comments as needed. I thought it went smoothly over the 90 minutes and the four of us have talked about doing this again in the future. One of my featured plants last night was the 'Sparkler' hosta (see directly below) which is a nice variety out of Walters Gardens (2011). I noted many members of the Wisconsin Hosta Society (www.wihostasociety.org/) in the audience and was glad that we had at least one hosta represented! I've included some of my other favorite varieties further below and all are identified underneath the image. RBG is a National Display Garden for the American Hosta Society and will continue to augment our collection annually.

We had some steady progress in the Horticulture Center with painting, sanding, resealing, etc. With significant snow coming tomorrow, we'll see how challenging it will be although we can still use the moisture. Dr. Gredler and Pat continued working on obelisks with Doc putting sealer on our cedar obelisks and Pat continuing the painting of the giant obelisk (bright yellow). Dave, Jim and Vern were all working on bench repair, sanding and resealing duties. Dick H. prepared (cut and bent) more new aluminum stakes for our plant labels and Terry popped in as well. Bill O. and Larry worked on various projects and Janice was in for more plant sale preparations. We also saw Mary F. We'll soon be producing our vegetable labels which is a monumental task from printing to processing to sorting and eventually placing these labels in 18,000 vegetable cells!