Hosta 'Bristol Frances Williams'
 

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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