When you start combining sizes, shapes, and leaf coloring you can produce some outstanding results which can take the breath away from even the most suspicious hosta critic.
Flowers and Fragrance
Despite being cultivated for the shapes and colors of the leaves, most hostas do flower for a brief period every year. From the middle of the plant, tall skinny flower scapes typically featuring white or purple flowers appear. The flowers are responsible for the scent in fragrant hostas.
You can buy early and late flowering varieties which can extend the flowering (and fragrance) season and some of the flowers can be truly handsome on their own.
If you have a large hosta collection it will seem as if one hosta or another is always blooming somewhere in the yard.
"No rules", rules!
When it comes to creating your hosta garden, the only rule is that there are no rules. Any combination you like will work. Some very popular combinations include:
- Putting yellow and blue hostas next to each other
- Surrounding larger hostas with small and medium hostas
- Mixing variegated and solid colored hostas
- Supplementing with other shade loving plants, like ferns, caladium, and tirella.
- Creating "hosta-only" shade beds
- Placing taller vase-shaped hostas behind, and close to, smaller low growing hostas so the taller foliage extends like a canopy above the smaller hostas
- Combining "Medio variegated" and "Marginally variegated" hostas of the same general color scheme.
Culture and Care
There is no right solution when it comes to creating a hosta bed, and if you want to improve the look, remember that hostas transplant (move) easily. I suggest you start with a handful of different (cheap) hostas and then add more as you go along. Try to buy some contrasting hostas to begin with.
Hostas are hardy herbaceous perennials which mean that the leaves die back to the ground every winter and return in the spring.
Hostas are typically readily available in garden centers and from online vendors in early spring, but can be planted in spring or fall and they love a loose organic soil (like a forest bottom). You can create this environment in any type of garden soil by the addition of organic matter. With hostas the rule is: the wider and deeper you amend the planting hole, the better result you will have. See the separate article: good gardensoil.
The crown (the white hard part between the leaves and the roots) should be planted just at soil level. A common mistake is planting them too deeply which will result in a poorly growing hosta. If you are planting bare root hostas (hostas without leaves showing), plant the pink or white "knobs" (buds) which appear on the crown at soil level.
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