making hosta beds

Empress Wu is, I understand, the largest hosta cultivar

As the daylily season draws to a close, I've been turning my attention to hostas. They don't have the beautiful flowers that daylilies have -- actually, I think the flowers are generally ugly -- but they have beautiful lush foliage.

I'd never thought much about hostas until the last couple years or so. There are a couple sections of our yard that needed...something...some kind of greenery besides grass. But these areas didn't get much sun, and so nothing really took. But some people gave us hostas through Freecycle (as long as I was willing to dig them up), and I learned that they can get by in the shade. Now several areas that are -- how do I put this -- strategically protected from the sun have beautiful hostas growing in them. Blair, meanwhile, started joking that daylilies and hostas are all that you need. In fact, her Twitter handle is hostadaylily. But even so, I still didn;t really appreciate them. Over the last several years I have come to appreciate that there's a rich diversity of daylilies, but I didn't really think about the fact that the same is true of hostas.

I think the turning point came a month or so ago, when I went on the LIDS garden tours. As I said when I wrote about that here, the last garden we toured had a heavy emphasis on hostas. Many varieties, of different sizes and shapes. The owner of that garden had handed out information sheets with listings of good mail order houses.

Well, we've placed a couple large orders and planted a whole lot of hostas. There's a large area of yard on the side of the house that's shaded by trees and not conducive to growing most plants that I would want. Well, that's now hosta city. Unlike when I initially started buying daylilies, I have actually been marking what's what. I have to get around to ordering stakes with labels from the label makers. We have about a dozen hosta labels to order, and a few daylily as well.

Despite the cost and the hard work involved, I can think of a few real benefits to ordering and planting our own hostas (not necessarily in order of importance):

• I get a more attractive yard (questionable -- arguably the yard would be more attractive if I gave up this gardening thing and just paid landscapers to make it beautiful).
• I'm actually getting some exercise outdoors
• Working the garden with Blair gives us an excuse to spend time together. Just the two of us, working on one project. With three kids, it can be hard to find those opportunities, and gardening with Blair is fun. But more than fun -- it's nice.