Thoughts for the Gossip Jr. August 2013
We live in a neighborhood of tree haters. The church next door has not only cut down all four of its 100 plus year old oaks in the parking lot, it has removed all the foundation shrubs from around the sanctuary. White river rock is their preferred landscaping material these days.
Recently, the parishioners learned that the church owned an additional acre of wooded land adjoining their cemetery, some kind of ancient surveying mistake. To my shock, a giant shredding machine showed up one day last month and reduced the woods into several gigantic piles of mulch and wood chips. Now there is a freshly cleared acre of red clay waiting for grass seed I presume.
I do not think these folks are hosta haters, they do seem very curious about them but it is hard to become hosta lovers without at least tolerating a few trees. I guess they will never know the joys of Hostadom.
I have found that lots of people hate bugs. My employees this summer were scared to death of anything with six legs and two sets of wings. Others reserve their disdain for spiders and some for ticks. Most of us are annoyed by mosquitos although some of us kill them with much more glee than necessary. In the South, traditionally we just brush them away, no slapping or hand clapping. I think spiders are really cool and marvel at their diversity. I understand that mosquitos are the bottom of the food chain and that they support every other creature on earth. I know that ticks need to make a living, too. I do not hate bugs.
I did run across a real bug hater though this summer, a real proponent of repeated applications of deadly organophosphates. As you know insects are not a major problem for hostas, not compared to slugs anyway. In all my years growing hostas, I have only sprayed once for aphids in one very cool spring and a few times for spider mites, (I might just hate spider mites), greenhouse pests that rarely invade my open air nursery. With insects, once you see the chew marks, it’s usually too late anyway.
So this person calls me on the phone and her hostas have various symptoms. Some are just going dormant early, some have gotten a little dry, and some have little bites out of them. It is late summer and I try to explain what summer weather and the natural turn of events can do to a hosta garden but there is no comforting her until the words Black Vine Weevil come out of my mouth. There is always a bug to blame and sure enough her garden got another dose of insecticide. I feel bad for the frogs and toads and for the bugs too.
In my woods, it has been a great year for tent caterpillars. In late summer they set up camp in the sourwood trees and proceed to defoliate them. We have a lot of bare sourwoods this year with Halloween-like cobwebbing completely covering them. It is a little spooky but the sourwoods will be fine in the spring. The caterpillars have just converted a large biomass of sourwood leaves into pelletized caterpillar poop, which is probably very good for my forest.
In the nursery, it has been a good year for fungus. It was so bad that I decided to actually do something about it; I got it identified. It is Colletotrichum, it is a mouthful, but I do like names that end in “trichum”. (It means hairy.) It is a fungus that causes the disease symptoms of anthracnose. It thrives in warm humid weather of which we have had an abundance this summer. Heat and drought, and good air circulation reduces this problem, so the last few years the damage has been minimal. I now have the power of science looking into this. I will share more when I know it.
All this leads me to think that many hosta folks have some pretty unreasonable ideas about the ability of their hostas to resist all the calamities that might happen to their leaves. We expect our hostas and their leaves to be perfect until they are subjected to at least two or three frosts in the fall. Hostas are even judged on their ability to look good all season; ‘First Frost’ won the Benedict Medal this year for just that reason. Amazingly, some years our hostas do not disappoint and fill the garden with a sea of perfect golden foliage in October. Most years, well, not so much. Things in the nursery can be even harsher.
Before you think your hosta friends have let you down, walk around your forest and try to find a single tree leaf that does not have a brown spot, a bite taken out of it, or a hole from being pierced by a small stick. Those tree leaves have done their job nourishing their trees, mightily this year, I might add, and are now ready to be recycled into mulch or critter food. It is all part of the plan. Most all our hosta leaves, too, are finished with their work by late summer and are functionally dormant. This makes them targets for all kinds of decomposers that might live in your garden. There is a reason that hosta leaf shows are in the spring; by midsummer there are no longer any perfect leaves to exhibit.
My hostas grow outdoors in my nursery and in my garden. Both environments are quite different actually because I want my hostas to grow quickly from small plants to large plants in the nursery and I want them to be fat and happy in my shady garden. Both environments have their advantages and disadvantages and the plants and hosta leaves look quite differently here and there.
My garden is on a cool north facing slope under huge beech and oak trees. It is really too shady there for hostas but it also stays 5-10 degrees cooler than the nursery. The hosta leaves stretch in height and size to collect as much light as possible. The plants are well spaced and watered once a day unless it rains for days at a time as it did in June and July. Fungus of any kind is usually not much of a problem under these cool, moist conditions. You might think that slugs would be a big problem but they are not at all. Maybe it’s because of the plague of frogs that inhabit our two small fish ponds.
Falling limbs and sticks are the biggest danger to my large shade induced hosta leaves. There seems to be a constant rain of arrows and spears that fall from the sky every time the wind blows. The worst damage is always after days of heavy rain, when water soaked branches many times their normal weight come crashing down, destroying whole clumps.
All in all the hostas in the garden preserve their leaves pretty well, there are just fewer of them because of all the shade. A few leaves do brown and shrivel during periods of extended dry weather but they are easily pinched off and discarded. My garden environment is pretty hosta friendly, even if it is too shady.
The nursery is a whole other world. It is like the difference between your job at the factory and Sunday afternoon on the living room couch. In the nursery we are all about plant production so we tend to overdo everything a little, trying to push our little hosta liners into saleable plants economically, and in the shortest time possible. Opposite of the garden, they are grown in a little too much light and will burn in excessive heat. They are overfed and overwatered and the foliage tends to stay wet longer than it should. They are crowded together. They start out as little liners perfectly spaced but in a year they are large divisions begging for more space and devouring their neighbors.
A year like this one with weeks of heavy rain, (with the irrigation turned off for weeks at a time), is just as problematic as the heat and drought of last summer. Hosta foliage that never dries will become mushy and rot. Bacteria take advantage of this, you can tell by the smell, and whole leaves are ruined. If the rain subsides but the humidity is still intense, a three shirt type of day, fungus will begin to invade hostas and nurseryman alike. This is where our friend Colletotrichum appears on the scene. When the dry weather finally comes, damaged hosta leaves will dry and turn brown and need to be removed.
It is said about North Carolina that if you don’t like the weather, just wait a day or two and it will change. We rarely get a week of cloudy weather, the fronts pass through and the sun returns. Well, it has been cloudy most every day each week since November, with just the last two weeks being dry, sunny and warm. Yes, the clouds have brought lots of rain but also have greatly reduced the light falling into my normally too sunny nursery. Less light and my nursery plants look like my garden plants, big leaves and very tall petioles. Yes, hostas love water but the side effects of reduced light and constantly wet leaves are hard on their leaves.
Every year, several hosta would-be growers ask me if they can grow their hostas inside their homes. I presume they want to protect them from falling branches, fungus, slugs, insects, deer, and voles. Those of you who grow seedlings know that yes, it is possible but not on the dining room table. Hostas need more light than you think and will wither away without it. They are also high humidity plants and do not really enjoy air conditioning. A few days on a vending table in a cool hotel will ruin a hosta for the rest of the summer. Take your chances on the deck or a partially shaded porch if you cannot bear to commit your hostas to the ground.
So yes, the environment that your hosta finds itself has a lot to do with the way its leaves look in late summer. Throw in a few furry mammals that would love to eat them from the bottom up or the top down and some microscopic worms swimming in between their veins and hostas can easily have lost by late summer that glow of perfection with which they enter the world in the spring. For many hostas damaged leaves are really not their fault, but there is a genetic component that also must be considered. Maybe those award winners like ‘First Frost’ are really genetically superior.
So now we jump into the old debate, is it nature or nurture, DNA or environment. There are two types of hostas, short season ones and long season ones. Yes, there are now hybrids of these two types that take after one parent more than another but it is still easier to cross two hostas that bloom at the same time than manipulate pollen and cross a late flowering hosta with an early flowering one and most new hostas are still hybridized that way. Long season hostas have a genetic advantage in the yearlong beauty contest over short season hostas.
If you live in “Short Season Land”, north of I-80, you can skip ahead, all your hostas are short season plants. The rest of us however know that those hostas that bloom early and set their seeds in June are probably thinking of winter by the middle of July. If you live in the South you know that many short season hostas, especially the smaller ones, will go dormant in July only to reappear in August with new leaves and try again to flower and set seed. Don’t be fooled by those stubborn H. sieboldiana hybrids that sit there until fall with scapes full of seeds and apparently perfect leaves. They have just learned how to nap through August in the shade of the old oak tree. The seeds are ready to plant by August at the latest and nothing much is going on in those mature leaves. A warm, humid summer will prove this as those big tough leaves will not be able to fight off the fungal invaders.
Long season hostas come in two types, the fragrant flowered hostas that have H. plantaginea from China in their background and the other late flowering hostas from Korea and Japan. H. plantaginea is a very unique hosta. In fact if you were to divide all the hosta species into two groups, H. plantaginea would be in your left hand and all the others in your right. It likes warm, humid weather but its DNA is smart enough to know all about the fungal problems that appear in that type of weather so it keeps replacing damaged leaves until it blooms in August. It will produce maybe 4 or 5 flushes of leaves before it sends up a scape, with the first set or two usually brown and shriveled when it does. It is not resistant to fungal attacks, on the contrary it is susceptible but it just out grows the attackers.
The other late flowering or long season hostas make their leaves in the spring, one or two flushes and then patiently wait through the summer before blooming in August or September. ‘Tardiflora’ is a good example. Its foliage, because of its DNA, holds up well into the fall. It might be resistant to fungal attack but in any case it must keep its few leaves all season to provide nourishment for seed production in late September and October. Interestingly, ‘First Frost’ is a sport of ‘Halcyon’, a cross of ‘Tardiflora’ and H. sieboldiana. The long season advantage has been passed along from mother to child.
So, can we breed better hostas with better late season foliage? Yes, I think so. Should it be our top priority? Maybe not, but we should think about it when we are culling seedlings, no matter how beautifully streaked they are.
Finally, give your hostas a break. They were designed for producing seed not having perfect leaves in all conditions. In the future all new hostas may keep their good looks into fall, if collectors demand that, but most likely there will always be the temptation to buy one of those hard to grow, but beautiful, hostas, just to prove that we can do it.
Give your hosta grower a break, too. We cannot control everything and sometimes the things we do just cause worse problems. Growing hostas in a greenhouse will keep the foliage dry and keep the leaves fungus free but oh, look out for those spider mites. (I think I do hate spider mites!) If your hostas have spots in late summer, just remember, they will be perfect, at least for a while, next spring.
Is the mini craze over? Have we been overrun by mice? Are “little” hostas now the rage or have the giants returned to reclaim Hostadom?
There is no denying that giant hostas are very popular again. (Maybe they always have been, until you run out of garden space, that is.) I blame ‘Empress Wu’ for that, not that it is a bad thing. It is a different thing however. Compared to minis, giant hostas take an extra year or two from a liner to look somewhat “giant” and even then the customer still has to take its ultimate size a little on faith. (It takes another couple of years in the garden before it resembles its photo on the Internet.) Minis look best, well, the smaller the better. In a season a mini liner can become a mini clump ready to plant with two or three companions in a decorative dish or a Hypertufa trough.
The biggest problem with miniature hostas is that some of them are miniature because they do not grow very well. There are good growing minis like ‘Cracker Crumbs’ with “mini” genes and ones that struggle like ‘Cat’s Eye’. Collectors get frustrated when one of the three minis in a bowl does not hold its own. It ruins the whole effect and it depresses the other two hostas that are overachieving. So selecting the best minis, minis that grow, is of dire importance but clear rational thinking generally gets sacrificed because “this little one is just so cute”.
While having a few dishes of miniature hostas is quite manageable, as the numbers of assorted containers starts to explode, overwintering can become a problem. Here in Zone 7 we just leave them in the garden, no problem. In Zone 6 they might be safer in the shed with the lawnmower and the weed whacker. (I always wanted to work the term “weed whacker” into an article without mentioning lawn maintenance.) Further North, garages become congested, making it difficult to get the snow blower out twice a week. Plus, ten containers is a lot to stack, one upon the other, carefully in a corner. Again, overwintering can become a problem.
‘Blue Mouse Ears’ and its many mouse prodigy have brought mini collecting to all types of gardeners, many who just had a few “hand me down” hostas at the time or none at all. The mice are fun and easy to understand. You just buy all the new ones and a few mouse accessories, statues and the like, and put them in your mouse nest. In time they would all look the same, just different. Well, ‘Frosted Mouse Ears’ gets bigger than ‘Holy Mouse Ears’ and ‘Green Mouse Ears’ is smaller yet, for some silly reason, so all this becomes less satisfying and we start to question our own gardening ability instead of lab rat genetics. (“What am I doing wrong?”) More mice just may mean more uncertainty.
First, let me say that miniature hostas are here to stay. They are fun and require only a very small hole. Yes, some are better than others but some giants are not so “giant” in everyone’s garden either. There are some great new little hostas on the way, like ‘Baby Booties’ that will sure to please us all. You notice I said “little hostas”. Maybe we need to look at this in a little different way.
When I think of “little hostas”, a term that makes me smile, my mind wanders to the book shelf and searches for The Book of Little Hostas by Kathy and Mike Shadrack. It is a lovely little book full of photos that professes the philosophy of miniature hostas. They see the world of minis a little larger than most hosta experts, including in it small, very small, (a new term they coined for a hosta smaller than a small but larger than the most strict definition of a mini), and miniature hostas. I like the idea of a larger view of miniature hostas, since there will be more hostas that fit that grouping and there will be a higher percentage of them that grow well. There are really very few tiny minis, maybe 200, and many of those are so small because they do not grow well.
Instead of using the new hosta term “very small”, which could be confusing when taken out of the context of the Shadracks’ book, miniatures have now been expanded to include any hosta ‘Blue Mouse Ears’ size or smaller. This gives us lots of good growing hostas to fill our dishes and troughs. ‘Baby Booties’ fits in this category perfectly as it is vigorous, short in height, and will spread into a small clump. It is perfect for a container for a couple of years but then might need to be divided and repotted. Imagine the thought of actually dividing a vigorous mini as opposed to watching it waste away. Which would you rather have?
So I think minis are here to stay. The best new ones may get a little bigger than the space we reserve for them and need to be divided once in a while, but at least they will grow. Just think of them as giant minis, the best of both worlds. But best of all, they are still so cute!