Now – my favorite subject! Hosta!
The past two days (which were really nice!) were sort of depressing for me. I had the task of cutting back all of our production hosta plants here at the nursery – signaling the end of this growing season. Sunday night we walked through our hosta garden at home, and then while cutting the plants here back – I once again was prompted of the excellent attributes of a few of these incredible plants!
Paul’s Glory – in the picture here it’s the hosta that is directly behind the pink impatiens. It’s a wonderful hosta variety. It’s considered a large hosta and has multi-colored leaves that provide very good substance. The thing that makes this a true winner in the hosta world is that after all of the hard frosts that we’ve had now in October, it still was holding up better than almost all of the other ones. The color had changed a little bit to a mellower yellow – but was still beautiful. From May – until almost November – you can enjoy this plant! Others that impressed me by making it through such heavy frosts without looking really tired – were Diana Remembered, Summer Breeze, many of my blue varieties, Guardian Angel and some of the traditional varieties. We have over 400 varieties of hosta in our gardens at home so it’s hard to even come close to picking a favorite but I must say that Paul’s Glory is right up in the top 10!
Hosta are such tough plants – so easy to grow and provide beauty and interest all during the spring, summer & fall. You can still plant hosta so they’ll be ready to emerge in the spring and become part of your landscape! Years ago – when we first started our hosta garden at home, we moved some clumps around in the fall, and we forgot one in the undergrowth on the edge of the woods. The next spring when we were on the deck, we could not figure out what was growing in amongst the weeds that was getting higher than the weeds. It was that clump of hosta that we had forgotten to plant. It made it through all winter – above ground. We don’t promote doing this with hosta – they do need to be planted – but it just shows how tough they can be. We have all of our plants on sale now at 30% off so if there were a variety of two that you were thinking of doing this year and didn’t – it’s still not too late to plant them. Just be sure to adequately mulch around the new plantings once we have a couple of inches of frost.
