Saturday Tour Garden Information
Saturday tour garden information and directions will be available at the registration desk.
Gardens are open from 8:15 am to 2:30 pm
Doug and Mardy Beilstein’s Garden
Hostaworks at Millcreek Gardens
Welcome to MC – Millcreek Gardens Inc., our new home, away from our old home in Mansfield, Ohio.
Aging requires adjustments like being closer to your kids but old addictions are hard to kick!
Megan, our daughter, works for Millcreek Gardens and the owner George Pealer, graciously provided a hoop house and a plot of land to build a new, Hostaworks, when we moved to Dublin. Our hybridizing continues in the hoop house with over 300 mother and father plants available and the maternity ward ready for any and all possible new seedlings. There are 30-40 trays, 16 cells each, of fledgling 6 month old seedlings waiting for their turn to rotate into the raised beds.
Speaking of raised beds, after our move we are down to two 12 x 32 beauties. You’d better be a good seedling because you only get 2 years to demonstrate yourself. Currently about 1000 seedlings are strutting their stuff. On the perimeter of the beds another 300 pots of candidates for hybridizing or keepers that are still under evaluation.
All good things eventually wind down ( not end totally ! ) and so it goes for our hybridizing program. I find myself with many great named cultivars, streaked seedlings and red legged and red flowering plants that I don’t intend to use again. They need a new home so there will be a fire sale of these plants. I envision about 200 of them. I will try my best to have a list of these hosta online ( Hostaworks.com ) May 2026. We have enlisted our grand children to help with what promises to be a bonanza for all.
Mardy and I hope to see you all we you visit Millcreek.
Jane & Clarence Hanna’s Garden
About Kirkside Hostas
My name is Clarence Hanna and I am an addict, a confirmed hostaholic. My problem began in 1999 when a friend of my wife’s gave her a hosta clump and said just cut it into pieces and plant it. Not knowing what we were doing, we divided the clump into 8 pieces and planted them and by the end of the summer we had a nice row of green hostas. That might have been the end of my interest in hostas except that the following year I went to an auction where a nursery was going out of business. Well I ended up hauling a truck load of new hostas home that day.
In the following years, curiosity led me to trying to grow hosta seeds and teaching myself the secrets of hybridizing. I retired in March of 2010 after working 33 years as a general contractor building houses, my addiction became all consuming.
Kirkside Hostas is setup as a hybridizing garden with most of the plants are grown in 7 shade houses ranging in size from 12′ x 48′ up to 20′ x 60′. Most of the breeding plants are in pots which are placed in an 8′ x 48′ area completely enclosed with shade cloth to keep out insects while they are flowering.
My first hybridizing goal was to create the largest hostas possible! Visitors always exclaim over the giant size hostas grown and displayed at Kirkside Hostas. I have taken the big ones and added the characteristics of pie-crust and corrugation, plus adding the colors of blue and yellow. Throw in some streaking plus many small to large size hostas and I have created a paradise like few others.
I will have several potted hostas, including streakers, for sale during the tour and there will be many hostas that I will be willing to dig and sell after the Convention by private appointment.
As of 2024 I have registered 10 hostas and 7 have gone into tissue culture. The striking H. Janie Girl is available only here and will be for sale.
Jane and I can’t wait to see your expressions as you walk through our shade houses of amazing plants. Bring your cameras!
John & Whaja Troutman’s Garden
I didn’t get into gardening until after I retired. Before that, I was content just keeping the grass mowed on our half-acre lot, which was entirely covered in grass. Our yard is quite shady, and I wasn’t sure what would thrive there. Then, I discovered hostas, and from that moment on, I’ve been expanding our garden beds each year. There have been some setbacks along the way. The Emerald Ash Borer wiped out eight mature ash trees, and lightning struck a maple, forcing us to remove it. Ironically, that became a blessing for my wife, as it created a sunny spot perfect for planting her vegetables. For me, it meant relocating a large, established hosta bed to a new location away from the sun. I’ve made plenty of mistakes and lost more than a few hostas, but I genuinely enjoy working in the garden. At first, I was drawn to giant hostas. Then, I became obsessed with variegated varieties of every size. These days, though, I’ve started to appreciate the beauty of solid-colored hostas as well.
Seeley’s Nursery
Seely’s Landscape & Nursery started out as a production nursery to grow and purchase in plants for our landscape division that we couldn’t find elsewhere. Eventually we became a retail nursery that sold these rare plants. Today we are a collector of thousands of unique and rare plants which include many dwarf conifers, Japanese maples, perennials, and of course Hostas. We produce our hostas either by splits from a mother plant, or by purchasing plugs from various wholesale tissue-culture nurseries. Currently we grow just over 400 varieties and have in stock over 4000 hostas available for purchase under our three large shade greenhouses. One unique thing we do is we grow a “Display Pot” or “Mother Plant” that sits behind that particular hosta variety. These Display Pots are not for sale but their little potted up splits in front of them are. We created the Display Pots to show customers what a mature specimen of that variety will look like in the future and splitting off babies. We do have a small hosta garden that people can walk through to show some of our older varieties that we no longer produce along with many of the new hostas we carry.
Seeley’s Nursery Hostas
