H. 'Sea Octopus'

This particular cultivar was obtained through a trade in 2008. It's a plant that has me puzzled. If you check it out in the Hosta Library you will see several pictures that will remind you of what you see here. But is what you are seeing the real thing? You see, the Library shows two very distinct and very different plants under the listing. You might think that could be a maturity issue, perhaps. The registration for the Mildred Seaver cultivar is even more confusing. Check it out on The Hosta Registry and you'll see the measurements for the leaf as being 12x3 inches and the plant as upright at 9 inches. The pictures on the Library that show a more mature plant certainly show an upright one, not the almost prostrate one you see in the pictures from Shauna Cannon and Patty Woodbury. The plant is listed by Lemke as being small, with the size being 12-16x9 inches.

What I have is easily 9" tall and it'll be a few years before I can give a width, seeing as there are only 2 shoots this year. It's a nice enough plant. The leaves in the registration are given as mat green and undulating, what I see in mine is wavy alright but I'm not so sure I'd call it mat green, it's more of a satin green, very difficult to capture with the camera. No doubt the backs on mine are glossy, there is no mention of the backs in the registration however.

Bottom line is, I don't really know what it is I have here. Hopefully the scapes and flowers will provide additional clues.

A few weeks later and I continue to find a strange fascination with this cultivar. Don't know what quite it is though, it has an elegance about it to me. The arching of the leaves, their satin-sheen green with the red blush on the petioles, the undulating margin, it somehow seems deserving of a more elegant name than 'Sea Octopus'. Admittedly my visual perspective of this plant is very different from what Mildred Seaver would have had when she developed this cultivar; she would have looked down upon it whereas for me it is almost at eye-level this year because of the spot it's in. Never mind it is shown here at ground level, it usually is on a shelf about 5 ft off the ground.

The first of the flowers opened up June 18/09 and when I took a closer look I couldn't help but spot this little spider, hiding in the notch formed by the leafy bract and the scape.

Late Tuesday June 23rd and throughout the night and day June 24th we had some long-awaited rain again. At that point we'd gone for something like 28 days without any measurable precipitation. A goodly number of potted Hostas were taken out from the sheltered area and put out into the yard to get a good dousing with the rain and rinse off all the dust and cobwebs. 'Sea Octopus' had been in flower for a few days already and I was lucky enough to catch this pollinator busy at work in a couple of the flowers. And he'd been doing a good job at it too, just take a look at this crop of the same picture, it's the other open flower off, on the left side, that's pollen where you'd like to see it!

There wasn't any information I could find with respect to the vigour of this cultivar and I think I have an answer to that question: it would appear to be quite a good grower, just look at the 2 new shoots to the left in this picture. On top of that the first of the flowers -which happens to be the one you see above with the little spider- now is developing a pod, so fertility seems assured.

Fast forward now to the second half of August and notice how nicely the pot is starting to fill in. One of the new offsets is nudging the edge of the pot and that makes me think that this variety may have a somewhat stoloniferous growth habit; that would be a good thing for it continuing to show that nice upright, arching leaf shape I like so much about it.

The first flush of flowers has resulted in a nice number of fat pods, and the second growth has now started to flower by early September. I've thus far not transplanted the plant into a larger pot, but I think that'll be done very soon, I'd like it to start out 2010 in a somewhat roomier home.

Those pods mentioned above resulted in quite a few seedlings in 2010. Here's but a handful of them, and you can already see quite a divergence of leaf shapes. Some are much more narrow than others. There was quite the number of pods and obviously only a few were germinated. Germination rate was by far the highest of all the seeds we germinated in 2010, and it'll be a task to cull by season's end to end up with a somewhat manageable number to take into 2011 and beyond.