I posted the pictures in booth locations. If someone said on Hostapix that it was a photoshop prank I never saw the post. Someone did say that their cousin would pull a prank or something similar to that, but I saw no one stand up and say it was fake or I would have challenged them on the point, as I am right now.

I can 100% guarantee you that it was not edited other than to reduce the size and recenter to posting.

Regards
Jerry

Jerry,
I hope you don't mind me posting the pics here since many GardenWeb users may not be members of the Hosta Hybridizing Forum.

Cool.

Beautiful!

Wow!

-Babka

Is it for real?

I just don't believe in a true-blue hosta flower. Would have to grow it to believe it. I'm not saying you're fibbing but color photography is often not true color.

True blue flowers are uncommon and impossible to create. Those sold as such, hostas or otherwise, are usually tinged with purple, magenta or some other color.

FWIW, while the colour temperature of the images shown may be off somewhat -the skin tones are too blue- in order to get the shade of blue shown through computer manipulation all the other colour values would be thrown off.

Here's a composite image showing how colour temperature influences how 'blue' things look. The larger image is with a much lower colour temp, the small inset is much higher. Notice the skin colour difference between the two.

I have no doubt the flower's colour is blue. Whether it's the shade of blue you see on your monitor all depends on how well-adjusted your monitor is, and most are set WAY too high -too blue- in colour temperature.

BTW, I rather suspect the actual colour is closer to what you see in the larger picture. Then again, my monitor is set @ 5500 Kelvin.

Pieter

Very interesting Pieter.
I recently heard a speaker talk about photography in the garden. He did spend some time talking about white balance. I could totally see that if a person had the wrong setting on their camera how you could get a blue pic from it.... I mean, on occasions when I've had my camera set for "indoor" when I was shooting outside, those pics were blue!

I don't know, Pieter. I think they were really pink...

Wow! you guys are really funny.

The flower is as blue as a sky blue hosta.

Believe what you want.
I posted some more pictures here.

http://www.hostahybridizers.com./viewtopic.php?f=2&t=102&sid=e2f10b31dab8fb5a8d18542ce8326c93&start=20

Jerry,
What would it take to get some of the seed???

can you imagine that blue on a white centerd hosta

mary

IâÂÂm a newbie when it comes to Hostas so I canâÂÂt comment on the possibility of blue flowers, but wouldnâÂÂt it be nice if Hosta flowers came it all kinds of colors and designs? :)

Oooooooooooooooo. With stars!

-Babka

There is no need to limit stars to flowers, why not design leaves with stars and more stripes.

Hi Jerry,

Over the years, I've compiled many HOSTA LISTS to help hosta gardeners everywhere. Perhaps you're familiar with these lists. There's a link to the Hosta Lists on the Hosta Library at www.hostalibrary.org. I update the lists annually, and offer paper copies to gardeners and clubs at printing cost. The current edition contains 75 lists and a total of 108 pages.

This year, I've written a brief description of your friend's blue-flowered hosta and have included it as part of the HOSTA LISTS. And now I have a request- can I use the photos you posted to accompany the description? The pics would be posted here under the heading, "Blue-flowered Hostas".

Thank you for considering my request. Please send me an email. Someday, I would like to see those flowers myself!

I live in Fort Worth,TX. I saw with my own eyes the hosta with deep BLUE funnel flowers in the garden patio of Chadra Restaurant at 1622 Park Place Ave, Ft. Worth, TX 76110, near the Camp Bowie Circle. 817.926.3992. I will call when the owner is there and see if he/she knows the name of the hosta. Here is a pic I took.

I was planning to wait until I updated the BLUE-FLOWERED HOSTAS list before posting the following information, but I will do so now.

John Soucek of Avon, Ohio emailed me the following information on 5-11-12:

"I noticed your article on the flower color with the pics from Jerry Bryant- the hosta pictured will be registered as 'St. Bernadette' and was hybridized by my daughter. The color is true-blue as the sky and so is the scape. My daughter is a graduate of Miami Ohio in Botany and had the same professor as Kevin Vaughan. We are also patenting the plant as well as doing our own tc. The marketing of the plant is up in the air for now. It is fertile both ways."

I'm currently trying to obtain additional photos of this new cultivar, including some of the flowers and scapes.

tfnmcam, can you take some more pics of the hosta you show above including some of the flowers and leaves, so that we can attempt to identify it? Thanks!

I am very sorry to hear of Mr. Soucek's passing. I know a good lot of you knew him personally; I wish his family all the best. What I just learned that does make me happy, however, is that his daughter is a hybridizer as well. The more hybridizers/breeders/nurserypeople I become aware of, I also note the very high percentage of spouses, siblings and children that are in the botany/horticulture field themselves. And the type of plant they overwhelmingly seem to specialize in? Well, of course it is the hosta. That says a lot about how special of a plant the hosta is. The "friendship plant", indeed. It may seem silly to some, but hostas have enriched my life in many ways, ways I can strongly feel, but can't really put into words and explain to other people.
A very huge thank you to Mr. Soucek, and to others who had, and have, such a love for hosta that newer generations are able to freely grasp the knowledge you've given to the horticultural world, and continue to knock our socks off with beautiful introductions for us to be amazed, and inspired by. This "hostamania", if you will, seems to very naturally and easily flow down through to the children and other members of the family. It's not like a parent who makes the kids take piano lessons, there doesn't seem to be much, if anything, about it that is 'forced', if you know what I mean. At least, that is what I see and get the strong feeling of when I read interviews and articles about children of legendary hosta pioneers/advocates. They follow in their parents' footsteps so freely, and take to it with equal enthusiasm and purpose like it's something they were born to do, as opposed to simply being 'born into it'. IS there a 'hosta gene'? I don't know, but I wouldn't bet against it. I'm 43 years old, and I WISH I'd become more aware to what the world of hosta was about a decade ago (or longer), but thats OK, I know what's up now, and I'm very glad I do, thanks to folks like Jon and Rachel Soucek!

Very sorry to hear of Mr. Soucek's passing.
Very glad and grateful to hear his love of Hostas is shared by his daughter.

My deepest sympathies to the Soucek family,

Don B.
Westminster, CO.

This post was edited by Don_in_Colorado on Sat, Jan 19, 13 at 3:30

Very nice note, DonB.

And this topic brought forward from last year or earlier, is very timely for me for totally different reasons.

I was mixing a blueberry smoothie tonight. The blue berries were indeed very blue. The milk was fat free. It took a matter of seconds in the blender for the combined milk and berries to become a lovely purple or lavender, but intense anyway.

It made me wonder, as this thread came in the scope of my mouse, if perhaps, with the hosta leaves being layered, having a white layer revealed somewhat in a variegated hosta, could it happen with the flowers too?

I am not being scientific here, it is not my nature actually, but I am wondering if the real flower color could be blue if there was no white present. In those blooms where there is white present, blue becomes purple or lavender? There are, for instance, blossoms which begin with a lavender tinge to them, and as the flower matures it becomes a "near white".....

As a hosta lover who is interested in the blooms and the fragrance, as well as the greenery or leafage, I hope the folks hybridizing hosta in the laboratory , the botanists like Ms Soucek too, will keep going on this.

As for St. Bernadette, I hope to live long enough to see one up close and in person.

Known jerry for alot of years as a collector of rare hostas he would not put his reputation on the line by changing colors on a pic just my opinion.

While I was the one who posted the color-adjusted composite picture, nowhere did I suggest Jerry manipulated the picture. I said, and maintain, that the color we see is inaccurate.The original clearly shows the picture was shot with the flowers in the shade. The light we get in the shade obviously is not direct sunlight, but the light reflected from the sky. When the picture was taken the sky was likely mostly blue. How do I know? Take a close look at the original shots and you will see some leaves that clearly show direct sun exposure. That means the shade was illuminated by blue light. The color of light we throw onto a subject directly influences how the colors of the object appear to us. Look at the color of the finger visible in the first picture and I think you'll agree that color is WRONG. And if the color of the skin is wrong, everything else in the picture has the wrong color.

Taking a look at the information contained within the image file I see the picture was shot on an iPhone, not a camera, and the white balance was set to auto. A picture with the color balance set for shade would have shown a more representative color, auto is the wrong setting when you have mostly shade in the shot but still see some direct sun. It was shot Sept 10/10 @ 5.12PM. With something as important as a game changing color in hosta flowers it is imperative IMHO that the pictures be shot on a proper camera, under controlled conditions, so that what we get presented with is an accurate representation of the color of the flower. A phone should be used what it was intended for: phone calls! Anyone who tries to draw conclusions from a picture shot on a phone with all the settings on auto/auto/auto is misguided. You cannot.

Pieter

A recent posting in another forum with respect to this rare cultivar forced me to revisit the colour issue I felt was a problem - see my posting directly above. Let me reiterate, I have NOT seen this flower, few have by the sounds of it and earlier indications of it being put into TC appear to have not been followed through to the point where viable TC product has made its way into the market place.

If you go back to the top of this thread you will find the picture below:

it was taken by Jerry Bryant, who also took the next picture...which was on the back of an issue of the Hosta Journal.

Clearly the latter picture show a much lighter colouration and that was my bone of contention in the first place. The 2 pictures were taken in different locations most likely and certainly in different lighting conditions. Looking at the angle of the shadows in the latter picture -there are no shadows in first one because it was taken in the shade- I'd be inclined to say it was taken either early in the day or late in the day. The colour temperature those times of day are around 4000K, on the warmer side of white and you can see that in that picture, whereas shade on a clear day in the summer may be as high as 9000K, decidedly on the blue side, as you can see in the first picture and that's what gave the blueish skin tone to the fingers.

I rather suspect the latter picture is closer to what the flower looks like in real life. It is unfortunate that with a flower colour this unique no consideration was given to documenting this under carefully controlled conditions. Perhaps someone owning this rare cultivar will give that some thought and share the end result.

Having said all that, perhaps I'm being somewhat pedantic. I'm very visually oriented, having been involved in photography for close to 60 years. What's a perfectly acceptable to picture to some doesn't necessarily cut muster with me. If I see an issue with sharpness because of either poor focus or camera shake it is at best a snapshot to only be kept if there are no others available and will never be used as a yard stick for evaluation or comparison. I much prefer to take my own pictures with a proper camera, yet I won't hesitate to use my phone's camera to grab a snapshot when I don't have my camera with me. The camera I use - an aging Panasonic G1 - lets me shoot in RAW and JPG at the same time and while I rely on the in-camera jpg's for a quick look I won't hesitate to process the RAW file to get an end result that is more representative of what the real life situation was actually like.

Let me illustrate. The following shot was taken early September of a Hosta rectifolia in bloom. The out-of-camera jpg is the first one, the processed RAW file is the 2nd one and it is what things looked like. To most the first picture will be perfectly acceptable, not to me, it's not what I actually saw.

and now what it actually looked like to me.

Having finally seen additional images of "St Bernadette" flowers from the same source I felt compelled to show that my original issue with the picture was justified.

Pieter

Thank you Pieter. Most people think don't stop to think about the conditions at the the time the photos were taken. Light plays funny tricks and needs to be considered when discussing the color of a bloom for official descriptions.

-Babka

I do appreciate it, when discussing color, that the poster mentions the time of day and time of year. Also, if for some other reason the color in the photo is more/less green in real life. Thanks for the science lesson.

Pietrer,

After all these years you just can't get past the fact that because you don't understand the pictures that they were not real. I still remember seeing the flowers I showed all those years ago. To this day I still contend the flower was as the picture showed. From what I remember they were all taken at the same time on a first generation iPhone camera in the sun. We tried using some plant trays to block the sun as we were looking right into it. The only editing I ever did to any of the pictures i ever showed was to crop the pictures down to size for posting, no color editing or enhancing. NONE. I was not trying to be a professional photographer, the pictures I took were just for my personal "use". Nor did I ever try to make any money or get any other benefit by posting the pictures.

I always found your comments to be so sad. I hope you find joy and happiness in other aspects of life.

jerry,

do you know if the hosta is in tissue culture or being sold? or being hybridized?

In the pic the OP's fingers are even blue, which says the light rays at the time were such that EVERYTHING in the photo appears bluer than it actually is. Pieter explained why that can happen very nicely. Jerry, you don't have to be nasty. Just get that blue flowered plant tc'd and sell it and you can make big bucks.

-Babka

Jerry, if you go back over all the threads that deal with the pictures in question you will see that nowhere did I suggest the pictures were manipulated, others did on Hostapix. I have taken both pictures and combined them into one file to make comparison easier. This is it:

If the flowers in these pictures -both from you- look to have identical colour to them to you, so be it...

Pieter

I am fully aware I am awful at taking pictures but do admire those who master the skill. That being said, even I understand that shadows (using the black tray to shade the hosta) can cast blue. I think it was fair and factual statements made by Pieter, and did not take it as an accusation towards the photograph being purposely altered. I hope this resolves itself as a misunderstanding... Any shade of blue in a hosta bloom is amazing and beautiful in itself, imho.