Most serious hosta growers love to tell this story. A fellow hears that they grow hostas and says, “Oh yeah, hostas: I have both kinds.”

The joke, for anyone not familiar with hostas, is that there are more than 5,000 varieties.

Only a few years back this wouldn’t have been funny at all. In fact, legend has it that the very first westerner to see hostas in their native northeast Asia sent two back to Germany in the 1600s, naming one “the common giboshi with plantain-like leaves” and the other one simply “the other one.”

I’m not the only one who disdained hostas for years, because they were all just big boring green leaves. Now I have more than 50, and no two are alike. They range from green to blue to gold, or in combinations where white or yellow stripes are on the leaf edges or down the centers, in size from tiny Mouse Ears to such giants as Empress Wu and Sum and Substance. Amazingly, new varieties still appear, every year.

But then, new varieties of almost every plant grown show up in garden catalogs every year. Where do they all come from, and will it ever end?

No, it won’t end. As for where they all come from…

New plants obviously appeared with some regularity even before there were humans. Mutation is the fundamental source of heritable or genetic variation, which is found throughout nature. Environmental factors influence the natural selection of those mutations best suited to survival.

The process was slightly refined when humans first started crop improvement by selecting, and nurturing, the best of the plants they depended on for survival. The first corn — Zea mays — was a far cry from any corn of today. It was even a far cry from its actual ancestor, teosinte, which was formerly thought to be more closely related to rice. (The story of the botanical archaeology that scientifically connected the teosinte of 9,000 years ago to today’s supersweet corn-on-the-cob began in the 1930s by comparing chromosomes, and wasn’t concluded until DNA profiling became available some 30 years later.)

The average modern supermarket reportedly stocks some 4,000 products that use corn, in some way. And all because early farmers in Southern Mexico spent many generations observing their crops and selectively breeding the best of them.

Most of us are familiar with the work of Gregor Mendel, often called the Father of Genetics, in the mid-1800s. That helped speed things up for intentional crop improvement. Yet, many new and improved cultivars “just appeared,” as the result of mutations.

A classic example is the Red Delicious apple. It was found in Wellsburg, Iowa, in 1880. Jesse Hiatt, a farmer who called it the “Hawkeye,” entered it in a contest held by Stark Nurseries in 1892 to find an apple to replace the popular Ben Davis. Stark bought the rights to the apple and renamed it “Stark Delicious.” By the 1980s, the yet-again renamed Red Delicious comprised 75% of the Washington apple harvest.

My just-wondering question is, how many other equally-good or better sports (mutations) have appeared, but without attracting any attention? We have more than a hundred wild apple trees on our land, and I prune and care for as many as I can (not very many) in hopes of eventually finding a real winner. It’s unlikely, but possible.

Incidentally, the Red Delicious has been largely replaced by newer varieties such as Gala and Honeycrisp.

Consider the clematis. English gardener Jo (Josephine) Hill bought a seedling from her local market in the early 1980s. Once it flowered she was charmed, but unable to identify it. When she showed it to the owner of a wholesale clematis nursery, he declared it a new cultivar, propagated it, and released in 1998 as Clematis “Josephine.” Again, how many gardeners see something unusual like this, never mention it, and let it die out? I recently heard a speaker call these “miracles in the garden,” urging everyday gardeners to be on the lookout for them.

Yes, science has allowed us to speed up the process. In the early 20^th century somebody discovered that ionizing radiation could artificially induce mutations. Early attempts used X-rays. Later, gamma and neutron radiation came into play. More recently, chemical agents with mutagenic properties were found, and now, of course, we have genetically engineered crops as well.

It’s obviously easier to make money by speeding up what is basically a natural process. Unfortunately, the profit factor also enters into such traits as shipability, which has taken precedence over flavor, nutrition, and other desirable traits. Consumers of both foods and flowers are always eager to try something new, and there are always businesspeople eager to sell to them.

We might debate whether the world really needs Roundup-Ready corn and soybeans, or how many cultivars of hosta or clematis are optimal for the public good, but one thing is certain: With more than 100,000 genes in the cell of a higher plant, mutations are inevitable, and both scientists and consumers are going to make the most of it.