I'm not a
botanist, I don't know the science. But I do know that hostas have
some kind of chemical in them that makes people nuts. I know people
who have normal size houses, with normal size back yards, normal kids and a
sensible spouse, and these people grow a thousand or more different kinds of
hostas. I don't know just one of these people. I know a bunch of
them. These people are obviously nuts and they have only one thing in
common, they've all come in contact with hostas.
Obviously, there
are still people who add a few hostas here and there to their gardens and
leave it at that. There must be some kind of threshold you have to
cross - one day you're a sensible gardener, the next day you're nuts.
I think the first sign of trouble is when you say to yourself, "I wonder how
many of these things I have now."
So you count
your hostas and you're surprised to realize that you already have 40
different kinds. You don't remember buying that many, you never
thought of yourself as a collector, it just sort of happened. And so you
start slipping it into your conversations with other gardeners, which is
your first mistake. Because someday you're going to tell someone you
have 40 different hostas and they're going to say, "Hey, that's a great
start. I have about 300 now." And that's going to drive you
nuts.
