Consider the Hostas

CONSIDER THE HOSTAS by Ray Pritchard Several weeks ago I noticed the hostas were starting to come up out of the ground. We have a long row of them by the sidewalk in front of our house. They were there when we moved in 11 years ago, and with very little attention from us, it happens the same way every year. They disappear in the fall and then reappear in the spring. Year after year the hostas have come back. They must be hardy plants because we basically don’t do anything to them. They keep coming back on their own. Here’s the amazing thing to me. On Monday when I was working in the yard, there were no hostas visible anywhere. It might as well have been the middle of January. On Monday, no hostas. On Wednesday, hostas everywhere. That amazed me, and still does. The plants weren’t full-grown, of course. Just a few green shoots popping out of the ground. But in 48 hours we went from brown dirt and dried-up leaves to a long row of young green shoots climbing out of the ground. In a few weeks, the hostas will fill in the space until you can’t even see the dirt. By the way, I consulted the Internet and discovered there are approximately 334,000 webpages that mention the lowly hosta. Perhaps I should not say they are “lowly”