This seedling selection from H. 'Frances Williams' is a non-registered cultivar from
Alex Summers of Delaware. Its blue-green leaves which have a wide, gold marginal
variegation are heavily corrugated and have thick substance.
Near white flowers bloom in dense clusters from mid-June into
July.
An article by Alex
Summers in
The
Hosta Journal (1995 Vol. 26 No. 2) was titled, "Hosta
'Frances Williams': A New Look at an Old Favorite". The main premise of the
piece was that over the long history of H. 'Frances Williams' which was
discovered in 1936, the plant sold by that name in recent decades is actually H.
'Aurora Borealis'. He claimed to have a clump of the original Williams' plant
which he named 'Bristol Frances Williams' to indicate that it is the one found
by Frances
Williams in 1936 in Bristol, CT. The plant known as H. 'Aurora
Borealis' came from a hosta that
Chet Tompkins' mother, Cynthia received from
England in 1924 and later named by
Thelma Rudolph of Illinois."
In an article in
The
Hosta Journal, (1999 Vol. 30 No. 1),
Alex Summers says that H. 'Bristol Frances Williams' is the true to type
form of H. 'Frances Williams' that
Frances Williams
found in a the Bristol Nursery in Connecticut in 1936. His claim was that
by the 1990s plants labeled as H. 'Frances Williams', H. 'Samurai'
and H. 'Aurora
Borealis' were all, in reality, H. 'Aurora Borealis'. Summers felt
that the true type of the original H. 'Frances Williams' was a different
plant which he then named H. 'Bristol Frances Williams' because it came
from the nursery in Bristol, CT. Hope that was not too confusing..."
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