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Why are these Plants so Expensive???

© Carol Wallace

In the beginning of my gardening career, I bought most of my plants at the kinds of garden supermarkets where they were priced by size. A quart pot cost less than a gallon pot, which cost less than a five-gallon pot - but every quart, gallon and five-gallon pot was the same price. The only way to get a bargain with this pricing method was to root through all the pots looking for the biggest plant. Or (as once happened) looking for one pot which accidentally had two plants.

It made sense to me. Pay a small price for a small plant, and a bigger price for a bigger plant.

Then one day I had the chance to have a spree in a "real" nursery, Seneca Hill Perennials. As my fee for a logo design I got to walk through that nursery and pick out enough plants to cover my bill. I thought that would be easy - except for two things. First of all, there were a lot of plants here that were new to me. And more important - they were all priced individually. I didn't realize that until I was checking out. I handed the nursery owner six hostas in quart pots. The nursery owner tallied aloud. "Five hostas at $3.99, one at $18."

"Eighteen dollars," I interrupted. "What is this - some kind of designer hosta?" She just laughed. And since I wasn't actually spending money, I kept the hosta, which turned out to be 'Patriot.' And as soon as I got home I went on a search to discover why that one hosta cost almost five times as much as the others.

The hosta 'Patriot' is a sport of a classic and popular hosta named 'Francee'. It's appeal lies in the extremely broad stripes of pure white in the leaves - much whiter than any other hosta around. 'Francee' is similar, but her white is less spectacular - and 'Francee' is still $3.99 or so in a quart pot.

As a sport, though, what happened was that one of Francee's leaves mutated into this spectacular configuration, which the canny grower immediately seized and propagated.

Now assuming that the grower had tone leaf with the new mutation. He can turn that leaf into one plant - and it will take a while for it to look like much of anything. So time and care and valuable stock space are given over to it, and yet all people can do is walk by it and admire it. People do. They admire it and they want it. The grower realizes that he has a potential winner here.

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