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Hostas get Better and Better
By Abbie Jury
Hostas are a top fashion plant at the moment, but most good gardeners have had a secret love affair with them for many years.
Despite their irritating habit of being deciduous and going underground in winter, they are superb foliage plants in shady areas where it is not always easy to find suitable plants to grow. You do need to be vigilant with the slug and snail control, but aside from that, they are very easy care plants They will appreciate an annual mulch with animal manure or compost in spring, but you can get away without that if they are surrounded by leaf litter from overhead trees.
Perhaps because they are so fashionable, recent years have seen an explosion in the number of varieties being offered and a growth in their mystique. Don't believe the hype. Hostas are really very simple.
They come in four sizes - miniature, small, medium and large. The miniatures are little treasures for special spots. The large ones can get very large, forming a clump up to a metre across and 60cm high with large leaves. They do need space. The small and the medium growers are obviously in between.
Hostas come in three basic colours - blue, gold and green, and an abundance of white and yellow variegations on these colours. These may be blue with yellow margin or green with a white margin, or yellow with a green margin or any other combination.
Hosta flowers are all in the blue-lilac colour range except for a few white ones. Generally they are grown for their foliage rather more than their flowers. The exception is the very fragrant pure white flowers on H.plantaginea which is a delight on a warm summer's evening. There are very few other scented hostas.
It is the huge variety of colours, textures and leaf shape which make hostas so interesting.. The keen collector can indulge their interest endlessly with subtle variations. However, we often see people bearing their landscape plans as if they are gospel, searching out the exact hosta named when there are usually varieties which will suffice just as well. Currently blue hostas outsell any other colour in our experience, and most of the big varieties are blue or blue with a yellow variegation. While the very large varieties and the showy variegated types have instant appeal, we do try to encourage newcomers to hostas to recognise that the large showy types are set off better better if planted alongside some of the smaller, plainer types which provide a refreshing contrast.
Hostas really are better out of the sun. They tend to burn. If you must plant them in the sun, then keep to the green or blue varieties. The golds and yellows and ones with pale variegations are particularly susceptible to sunburn. They are renowned for their ability to thrive in very damp conditions, but we also use them extensively in very dry shade. Mulching becomes more important in dry shade and they need ample moisture in spring to develop the foliage. Fortunately our rains are pretty reliable in spring.
We rely on slug bait or hunting by torchlight to keep the snails and slugs at bay. Others swear by a spray of copper, or surrounding the plant with a little trail of copper crystals or even sand. If you have pets who have a taste for slugbait, you can try the old trick of a half empty beer can hidden discreetly (the smell of the beer and the sugar attracts the snails and they drown) or inverted orange skins which you then empty out each morning.
If you feel you must divide your hostas, then try and restrain yourself for the first three years. It takes two seasons for hostas to settle in and reach mature size. Wait until the hosta has gone dormant in mid winter. Some gardeners are driven by the desire to divide, divide, divide but in our experience in the garden, hostas are best left to grow in peace. They'll just get better and better.
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Abbie and husband Mark Jury maintain the Jury Garden at Tikorangi in North Taranaki. They continue a history of plant hybridising and many of their plant lines are sold exclusively in Auckland through Kings Plant Barns.
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