Thoughts off the top of my head August, 2017
As many of you know, I am a traveling man. Some years are a crazy crisscross across the Midwest, some are a few long hauls and the rest are just a lot of time in cheap motels. I live in a corner of Hostadom so nothing is really nearby. Fortunately I have the temperament of a truck driver and the miles just roll by.
Whenever I finally appear at a regional meeting or the National Convention, I am always asked how long a drive I had. This year Indianapolis was 11 or so hours. Most of you cringe at the thought of such a long drive, understandably. Now that I am getting older and time has become more valuable I have starting flying to one day meetings and the lectures I give. I have a 12 hour rule. If the destination is over 12 hours by truck then I consider flying. It’s cheaper for the club usually and yes I can still bring hostas. Bags fly free!!!
So I thought you might like to ride along with me on last summer’s adventures and share some of my observations as I rode through the cornfields. Speaking of corn, the corn crop in the Midwest was planted late this year because of the abundance of spring rains. Many fields were just planted in mid-June and then flooded when I returned in July. I have always thought that I could give my own crop report for investors in corn and bean futures, but I am smart enough to know that commodity prices have more to do with drought in Brazil than rain in Iowa sometimes.
The AHS National Convention in Indianapolis was a return visit for many of us. It was my fourth National in that fair city. The first in 1989 was held at a very nice downtown hotel. Big cities frighten me; I am still a country boy. I will drive 100 miles out of the way to avoid Chicago. (Who wouldn’t?) The parking for the convention that year was in one of those parking garages with the hanging pipe at the entrance to measure clearance. My old red truck scraped the bottom of it as I entered, ugh! I parked 20 feet inside the gate and backed out on Sunday. I hate parking garages; I will drive 100 miles to avoid them.
I always go on the garden tours at whatever meeting I attend. I hate being incarcerated in the vending room and start to plan my escape whenever I see the door is left ajar. Some of the gardens were repeats from past conventions. Some folks grumbled, we always want to have something new and shiny to look at but not me, I enjoy witnessing evolution. How often do you get to see hosta clumps untouched for 10 or more years?
While hostas can be thought of as being immortal, being reborn each spring, they do age. That single division plant you so carefully planted, in five years grows into what we call a “mature” clump. That means only that it has as large leaves and shoots as its DNA will allow. At that point in time it may be a twenty division clump or just have two or three fat divisions with very large leaves. When we envision a hosta it is usually at this stage in it is life. We and the hosta are both very happy with each other.
The next 5-10 years are the glory years for a hosta that is if tree roots don’t strangle it or it is not divided by some industrious gardener. While its leaves do not get appreciably larger the hosta does increase its number of divisions and the clump will widen and may get a little taller as leaves from the middle of the clump stretch to find their way up to the sunlight.
We tend to divide the smaller, faster growing hostas, to some extent because it is easier, but also because they bounce back faster. Some small hostas can be divided every two years and still maintain their “mature” look. Large and very large hostas however show their displeasure at being divided by shrinking for a year or two after they go under the knife. They sulk. That’s why I recommend you never divide large hostas unless of course they start to shrink, just make room for them to spread and get out of the way.
If left to their own volition teenage hostas large and small will get a little wanderlust and start to drift downhill or even uphill. The once perfect spacing of your hosta clumps will start to resemble a jumble, who said plants can’t walk? The clumps will start to open up from the center as each division starts to head in a different direction. At first the result is just a magnificent ever widening clump but over time a bald spot forms in the center of the clump and then eventually after 20 or more years several individual plants remain where once there was only a huge clump.
As you know we say these balding hostas with no shoots in the middle have formed “fairy rings”. From ‘Golden Tiara’ to ‘Guacamole’ to a whole myriad of H. sieboldiana children old hostas will form fairy rings. Sometimes it is impossible to tell, until you pull apart the leaves in the center of the clump to reveal the empty center. Evidently the old crown gets so pithy that it just produces shoots on its edges, sort of like a hollow tree. To remedy this some folks take a bulb planter and core out the old unproductive crown, a plug here and a plug there, allowing the hosta to retreat inward.
Hostas that run naturally have stolons or rhizomes, depending on whom you consult, and form loose mats naturally. These wanderings may at first spread outward covering a wide area making a flat mound but can also spread back upon itself to the clump center. Even miniature hostas can form large mats up to 2-3 feet wide. These hostas rarely form fairy rings but do tend to move faster across the garden.
It is my opinion that restricting large hostas to a container seems to eliminate the occurrence of fairy rings. Don’t ask me why. Maybe incarceration does not affect hostas like my time in the vending room does me. They know life is better in a pot away from those nasty tree roots and voles and they just accept it and enjoy life. With that attitude it might explain why they are immortal.
One of my travels this summer took me to Norfolk, Virginia for the National Daylily Convention. Yes, I ride the buses and see all the gardens. Two days of seeing daylily flowers is just about the right amount to satisfy my need to bathe in a riot of color in full sun. Two days of raw oysters and craft beer might not have been quite enough of that however.
The first garden I visited daylilies were almost an afterthought. It was a collection of agaves, conifers, perennials, palms, bromeliads, and almost any other plant you might find in a garden center in specimen size. Yes, there were hostas too, mostly confined to bowls and the too shady, ferny parts of the garden. They were well grown and made a statement, but it was very soft spoken one compared to the boisterous color of the tropicals.
It got me thinking about the best usage for hostas in the landscape. Hostas are all about color in the shade garden but they can’t compete with the bright, almost unnatural colors of tropical plants. Tall orangy-red upright bromeliads, the rich purple of wandering tradescantia, the electric blue of giant agaves and then there are the multicolored crotons, all colors we wish graced hosta leaves. There is a saturation of color that is muted in hostas.
In another garden or two I saw caladiums, really kind of weak looking plants, but boy, now those rascals have red leaves! Some are red sprinkled with green and white, how do they do that? Hostas are much tidier, restricting color to the leaf margin or the leaf center with the occasional splashy streak, but nothing too gaudy.
Mixed with tropicals hostas do not stand out. So let’s don’t use them that way. They stand a better chance in shady spot in a perennial garden but they tend to look like stuffy old-timers while the masses of perennial flowers dancing in the wind are the life of the party. Hostas look out of place where design is all about the mixing of pastels and hot colors. So let’s don’t do that either.
I like hostas in a shrub garden. Turn a corner and wow, there’s a hosta. But they are certainly only accessories for the larger show of flowering shrubs and small trees that frequently devour them with their rapid growth after a couple of years. In commercial settings, even in the North they do not make great foundation plants. They are fresh perfection in spring but frequently look like they need to be manicured by mid-summer, at least the scapes need a trim. Few hostas have impressive foliage and flowers to provide all season interest. By fall, you might have wished you had planted annuals instead.
I have come to the conclusion that hostas look best when surrounded by other hostas, side by side, lots and lots of them, the more the better. For all the criticism of monoculture gardens, hostas might very well be the exception to the rule. Walk off the bus into a sea of 1000 well grown hosta clumps of every shade of green, yellow, blue, and white under mature hardwoods like we did in Indy and it will take even the most color crazed garden designer’s breath away.
Hostas create their own unique mood. Their sheer size, those huge waist high masses of foot and a half long leaves, inspires awe. Yes, hostas are awesome. Some say it is a tropical look but to me, hostas lack the rampant randomness of tropical gardens; in contrast just by their presence they create order. This order then creates peace. Hostas do not run all over the garden, instead they form sturdy clumps of carefully arranged leaves and flowers. A hosta garden becomes a secure, safe place.
Hosta gardens for all their formality still provide plenty of diversity for the eye. Diversity of leaf shape, clump size, and color abounds but it does not scream at you, it whispers, it comforts. A hosta garden is a calm demonstration of color not a riot, it is a place to sit and reflect. It is a cool oasis in the hurried high tech world in which we live. Cell phones are not welcome there.
On hosta tours I still see garden visitors scurrying from clump to clump taking photos and making lists. They do not want to miss reading a single label. I used to feel this urgency but now the hostas urge me to relax in their safe protection, sit a while, and just let my hectic life rush by. It is not that I no longer seek out a label here and there under the petticoat of an intriguing looking hosta; I just do it at a slower, more respectful pace. A great hosta garden is a magical place but sometimes we don’t see the garden for the hosta… labels.