Beyond the Cheddar Curtain: Thinking About My Favorite Hostas Today

There's sunshine this morning! Hope your day is starting out as promising as mine is! The sky is blue and the snow is fresh and sparkling. There's a flock of cardinals zipping around the yard and it is even supposed to warm up a bit today. I can also hear a couple of songbirds (and I don't mean the crows) singing away.

I love how the yard and trees look when they are covered in snow but I'm also getting pumped about spring. February is zooming by so quickly! It seems like spring will be here any second. Yes, yes, I know. This is Wisconsin and we won't be seeing spring anytime soon...but it feels like it's going to be here soon. I'm running with that.

Thinking about spring has me thinking about my garden and the plants that grow there. My favorite garden plant is hosta. A pedestrian choice, sure, but I don't care. They make me happy.

Although I don't have a single favorite hosta cultivar, I grow several that I think are just so lovely that I want to single them out for praise. Unsurprisingly, most are tried-and-true varieties that have been around for a long time and can be found in many gardens. One, Dream Queen, is a newer variety and it's taken a while for me to see its charms.

Gold Heart Bleeding Heart,
Olive Bailey Langdon Hosta, Sagae Hostas,
and Epimedium

Sagae is not only pretty but it has room under it for other plants. I tuck epimediums under mine and they seem happy together. Slugs and earwigs are the main menace to hostas in my garden but they tend to leave Sagae mostly alone, which means they still look decent later in the season when the rest of my hostas are hole-y terrors.

Sagae just starting to leave out

Olive Bailey Langdon is my favorite hosta color combo: blue and green. It doesn't leave any room at its base for other plants but I love how pretty and happy it always is.

Sum and Substance in late summer in a bed that badly needs some maintenance

Sum and Substance is the star in my front yard's street-side border. It's huge size and chartreuse leaves stand out against the dark of the spruce trees that flank it. It's the only large hosta I grow at the moment. Trying to divide a mature S&S is a fool's errand but last year I managed to chip a bit off of a couple of plants to expand my S&S family. We will have to see this spring if they survived both the winter and competition from those thirsty and aggressive spruces.

Krossa Regal is a tough plant that survived where my beloved japanese maple tragically could not

Krossa Regal has a rough gig in my garden. I have several planted in a steep bed that is completely shaded most of the day with the exception of a couple blazingly hot hours of full sun in the middle of the day. My japanese maple couldn't handle it but KR is doing fine. I just have to keep it sprayed so the deer don't get it and keep on eye on the watering. (The neighborhood deer just really seem to like KR even though it's planted by the house and not exactly easy to get to. They will bypass other types of hostas to get to the KR) Mine is tucked in with Hakone grass but its vase-like shape lets it grow well above the grass.

Dream Queen took a while to find its place in my garden. It just struggled and struggled and I had read some bad reviews about it online so I was close to giving up on it but then I found it a home it liked and now I've come to appreciate its slug-free leaves and pretty leaf shape and colors.

Dream Queen is another hosta I really like but it's a very slow growing diva.

Guess which one is Gold Standard?

Finally, there's Gold Standard. I never expected to like Gold Standard. There's nothing particularly unique about its shape or size. It's not even a color I like in hostas. But it shines so brightly in my dark and shady patio garden, I find myself drawn to it when I gaze down from the deck to look at the hostas. The only problem with GS is that the earwigs love it too.

I love all the different cultivars I grow, even the bland ones like lanceleaf hosta. I love how their shapes and colors change as the growing season progresses. I love the flowers, especially the fragrant white ones, like Fragrant Bouquet has. The tree frogs and bees and hummingbirds like them too. Which makes me like hostas even more. I guess I'm just a sucker for hostas.