Hostas are the solution to shade

Quandary! What if you love trees but you also love flowers and gardening? Trees provide relief from the unrelenting heat of Georgia summers and create an atmosphere of tranquility, but they also block out the sun, a requirement for most annuals and perennials. When my family decided to move from the city to a rural suburban home, we fell in love with a home I described to friends and relatives as a home that looked like it was helicoptered into a hardwood forest. Within days of moving into our new home, I soon asked myself, how can I love a house in the woods and also have a flower garden? The solution was hostas!

No shade garden should be without a hosta. I now have more than 75 varieties of hostas in my garden. Hostas have been the mainstay of shade gardens for at least one hundred years. Even though their flowers are insignificant, the appeal is the diversity of their leaves. The leaves of hostas, thanks to hybridizers, come in a variety of sizes, colors, and textures.

Hosta is a diverse genus of plants native to Japan and brought to the United States in the mid-1800s. Interestingly, Dr. Philip von Siebold, the first European that wished to share hostas with the world beyond the borders of Japan, smuggled them out of Japan by boat. Unfortunately, the ship wrecked, and a forbidden map of Japanese coastline was discovered along with Siebold’s collection of hostas, resulting in his arrest and the loss of most of his precious cargo of botanical specimens. Some hostas survived and were successfully introduced beyond the borders of Japan in the 1830s.

For over 100 years, hostas have been extensively hybridized by both amateurs and professionals to produce hundreds of shade garden possibilities. For drama, try big and bold hostas with large dinner platesized leaves such as Elegans, Big Daddy or Sum and Substance or small and demure varieties such as Little Blue Mouse Ears. Color options are also available from true green to blue green to chartreuse green to yellow green. Other hosta hybrids provide more possibilities, including those with white, cream or blue borders,

About the Author

hostas with white, lavender, and purple flowers, as well as flowers with fragrance and without fragrance. Thanks to hybridizing techniques, the hosta varieties seem endless, and there are always new introductions to add to your woodland garden.

Another benefit of adding hostas to your garden: they are easy to grow! All they need is soil amended with compost, water/rain once a week, and dose of fertilizer or manure in the spring. If deer inhabit your woodland garden, you will need to purchase a deer repellent. My favorite is Liquid Fence® which I apply with a sprayer once a month.

To begin your love affair with hostas, go online, search ‘hosta’ and click on images to look at the dazzling varieties of hostas to add appeal to your woodland garden.

PROVIDED

To learn more about how to plant, care for, fertilize, and prevent eradication from deer, hostas’ enemy number one, visit the NFMG YouTube channel and check out my Spring 2021 Gardening Lecture, “Hosta – A Perfect Addition to Your Shade Garden” at https://youtu.be/ N5vUNT1aYjw.

Happy gardening!

North Fulton Master Gardeners, Inc. is a Georgia nonprofit 501(c) (3) organization whose purpose is to educate its members and the public in the areas of horticulture and ecology in order to promote and foster community enrichment. Master Gardener Volunteers are trained and certified by The University of Georgia Cooperative Extension. Learn more at nfmg.net.

This week’s “Garden Buzz” guest columnist is Carole MacMullan, a master gardener since 2012. Carole describes herself as a born biologist. Since childhood, she loved to explore the out-of-doors and garden with her mother. When she entered college, she selected biology as her major and made teaching high school biology her career for 35 years. After retirement in 2008, she had three goals: to move from Pittsburgh to Atlanta to be near her daughter and granddaughter, to volunteer, and to become a Master Gardener. Shortly after moving, she became involved with the philanthropic mission of the Assistance League of Atlanta (ALA) and in 2012, completed the Master Gardener program and joined the North Fulton Master Gardeners (NFMG) and the Milton Garden Club. Carole uses her teaching skills to create a variety of presentations on gardening topics for the NFMG Lecture Series and Speakers Bureau. She also volunteers weekly at the ALA thrift store and acts as chair of their Links to Education scholarship program. Her favorite hobbies are gardening, hiking, biking, and reading.

For more information

• Growing Hostas - https://extension.uga.edu/publications/detail. html?number=C955

• Rosemary

• North Fulton Master Gardenershttps://www.nfmg.net/