Pic of the Day--Midwest Magic

Hank Zumach · Post by **Hank Zumach** » Mar 24, 2007 10:58 am

Hi All--Midwest Magic has made some very interesting changes since I purchased it in 2000 and planted it in a spot that was getting about 3-4 hours of sun. In early spring of 2002 I decided to move it to a spot that was getting about 6 hours of sun. Then in 2003 a tree branch grew out over the spot and it might get 3 hours of sun. What is interesting to me is the color changes that the plant has gone through, from having center coloring of a nice yellow when it was in more shade to green to chartreuse. The same kind of variation in color is apparent in the photos that are shown in the Hosta Library so this plant must be quite sensitive to light conditions. Midwest Magic has grown very well. In both 2001 and 2002 it was 36x16. That lack of growth was due to the move, I believe. In 2003 it was 51x22, leaping right past Zilis' listing of 47x21. It kept right on growing, reaching 65x22 in 2004, 60x25 in 2005 and 64x30 last summer. Slugs like this variety too, so it benefits from treatment.

Registry - http://www.hostaregistrar.org/detail.ph ... st%20Magic
MyHostas - http://myhostas.be/db/hostas/Midwest+Magic
Hosta Library - http://www.hostalibrary.org/m/midwest.html

The photos are from 2002, 2004, and 2006.

: Midwest Magic 6-26-06c.jpg (66.06 KiB) Viewed 2676 times

: Midwest Magic 7-2-04c.JPG (63.16 KiB) Viewed 2676 times

: Midwest Magic 6-24-02c 009.jpg (60.31 KiB) Viewed 2676 times

LucyGoose · Post by **LucyGoose** » Mar 24, 2007 11:46 am

Soooo pretty Hank!!

Yep, I am scrolling to read!

Thanks for POD!!

Hank Zumach · Post by **Hank Zumach** » Mar 24, 2007 4:22 pm

Do you know why you have to scroll and I don't? I am not a techie but it seems that the images and writing shoud show up the same on everyone's monitor.

I have started to compress my photos so that they are under 70 kb. I size them at 800x600. With those settings, the photos don't show up as thumbnails and they are sharp enough to be decent images.

jgh · Post by **jgh** » Mar 24, 2007 4:24 pm

Mark Zilis registered Midwest Magic in 1999. He also introduced Erie Magic, a muted reverse sport of MM... and Prairie Magic, a EM sport with dark green center and sharp contrast. No surprise that he gave MM its own featured listing in his book.

Apparently people originally thought MM was a sport from Zounds, ala Dick Ward. Later it was established as a sport from a yellow seedling which was later registered as Prairie Glow. Zilis talks about the different coloring based on the amount of light it gets, with more light making it tend to stay yellow longer into the season.

Somehow I don't think of this one when I list my favorites, but then I look at the photos and realize just how much I like it. Great colors, great texture, and grows more vigorously than similarly colored Tokudamas.

Mine definitely changes color through the season. I've got some pretty good pics from June and August, 2005.

jgh · Post by **jgh** » Mar 24, 2007 4:30 pm

I put in Prairie Magic in 2002, at the same time as the MM. It hasn't been as vigorous, and the leaf texture isn't highly corrugated like its Grandma...

jgh · Post by **jgh** » Mar 24, 2007 4:36 pm

and Lucy... I, too, have had to scroll... changed yesterday or maybe the day before... don't know why... also I've lost a couple of my posts after spending 20 minutes on my slow dial-up loading the photos... plus it just logs me off sometimes for unknown reason.

I blame everything on my aging machine, but if you have to scroll as well... maybe something has changed since the server went down... has anybody asked Chris?

Post by **Chris_W** » Mar 24, 2007 5:06 pm

Hi,

I just recently changed it so that thumbnails would not be created unless the image was over 70kb.

I think I will change it back to the 55kb we had for so long, since then people didn't have to scroll.

The server seems to be working better now. No?

So Hank, lets scratch the 70kb limit and I'll put it back the way it was at 55kb (thumbnails will be created above 55kb, the image will display as is below that).

Sorry for all the problems

jgh · Post by **jgh** » Mar 25, 2007 1:49 am

Hi, Chris...

just to add to the mystery - on my postings, the "thumbnail" I see as part of the message is actually larger than the picture I get when I click on it.

The scrolling I was talking about is I have to widen my screen to maximum and then scroll some side-to-side to read the text of the messages. Seems like that's a change...

Pieter · Post by **Pieter** » Mar 25, 2007 10:05 am

All this talk about having to scroll is due to the variety of desktop sizes being used. Anyone with a slightly older computer probably has the desktop size set to what it came out of the box with: 800x600. With that small of a desktop the actual viewing area in a browser is about 779 pixels wide. This takes into account the browser's border and the vertical scrollbar and assumes the browser is being used full-screen.

A lot of people do not get the concept of using a larger desktop size -I have mine set to 1600x1200 for example- and as soon as you show them they will complain about the smaller sized text, not realizing that is something you can set separately.

Given the 779 pixel width in viewing area, an 800x600 image will create the addition of the horizontal scrollbar. With the author column in postings -which I guess is around 175 pixels in width- that means there probably is only about 600 pixels for picture width for these folks.

When you check to see how common 800 pixels wide is, check out http://mentalized.net/journal/2006/10/2 ... l_numbers/
and you find these folks represent roughly 2% of the worldwide viewing audience.

So, I suppose that those of us who post pictures might keep these 2% in mind and have the actual image size about 600x480.