ID, puhleaze....

[Pieter]

So here we were, my wife and I, walking back to the car in the Costco parking lot past their seasonal plant area and I spotted an unfamiliar/unusual looking blue hosta. We dropped our purchases in the car and we went back in to investigate.

What had caught my eye was tagged as being 'Halcyon' and as you can see from the pictures it is anything but. It may be in the 'Halcyon' family, as in a sport, but there was at least 20 2 gallon pots with the same mislabeled plant so the whole batch is misidentified.

This is what caught my eye: blue, glaucous back, tapered wavy leaves with serration! No way this is 'Halcyon', but what is it?

For 11 bucks I took a chance on it, now to properly ID it would be nice...

Anyone have any ideas?

[Pieter]

Thanks to the efforts of others it would appear as if I have 'Restless Sea' here...

[Tigger]

I would agree with that. Crunchiest hosta in our collection, so far.

[Pieter]

Crunchiest hosta......

Now there's a new term to be added to the Hosta Dictionary

[Diana]

Tigger-. "Crunchiest" ????? You eating these things???
-Babka

[Chris_W]

Hosta Restless Sea would seem a strange plant to get mixed up with Halcyon however it is a recent addition to the large Dutch wholesaler Darwin Plants' catalog. It isn't unusual for this to happen when dealing with thousands upon thousands of hostas in the sorting and warehousing process, then whichever grower decided to start these in pots either didn't realize or didn't care that they were wrong. They might have even dumped them on Costco because of it.

Unfortunately Darwin Plants are also very well known for spreading HVX so be careful with it, or if you have test kits then I would use one here. The blues don't show symptoms all that easily/readily. But hopefully it is okay - nice plant.

[Pieter]

Chris, you're right, I AM vigilant about HVX. First thing I do whenever I see hostas at a local retail place is to first do a spot check and if something halfway suspicious shows on one plant I'll take a look at all the samples of that variety on display. Just last week I was at our neighbourhood boutique nursery and I was very taken by a 'Liberty' I saw there -was looking for something taller to go into an upright glazed pot- and I didn't like what I saw on the sample I picked up so I inspected all they had on display. I passed, they all showed early signs of collapsing tissue.... In this batch of 'Restless Sea' however none gave me any concerns... Thanks for the reminder

[ViolaAnn]

I would concur with 'Restless Sea'. I love mine and hope yours grows up nicely.

[Pieter]

Chris' comments prompted me to take a closer look, and sure enough... it's back for a refund

Must admit that when I took the first batch of pictures I was concerned over what I saw in one of them but shrugged it off at the time. Thanks again for the heads-up Chris with respect to Darwin Plants!

[Chris_W]

I'm glad you took a closer look. The blues often are hard to notice when they have HVX, but that one has enough faint markings to make me think that you made the right choice to take it back.