A love-hate relationship with Hostas

How I grow Hostas in the land of the deer

When I first discovered hostas I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Since then, I realize hostas can be as much a stairway to heaven as a highway to hell.

I’m aging myself big time here, but let me explain my love-hate relationship with the hosta.

Much has been written about the joy of planting these incredibly hardy and versatile plants in the garden, and I’m the first to say that they make the ideal ground cover for the woodland garden adding texture, and, if variegated hostas are used, some interesting colour to the shadiest of areas in the garden.

A beautiful variagated hosta takes its place in the woodland garden where it benefits from the constant watering from th bird bath.

Most proponents of hostas, I’m sure, are gardeners who have a fenced yard and live in the middle of a subdivision no-where near even the slightest hint of a deer.

That’s not me and my garden.

For years, I welcomed deer to the yard and even enticed them with a lovely assortment of grains and corn in a backyard feeder. So, it goes without saying that the deer thought everything was fair game including, of course, my inherited hostas that made up a good part of the meagre greenery when we first moved into our home.

And these were not today’s new hybrid, deer-resistant hostas. These were the most delicate, almost lettuce-like, old-world hostas that the deer simply loved to munch on whenever given the chance. Young, old, big old bucks, small fawns it didn’t matter. When the hostas were up and just beginning to look their best complete with those fresh spring greens, the herds of deer would move in and overnight cut them down to a few spindly stems.

Hostas and ferns form the perfect combination in any garden.

All they left behind was their droppings to remind me who was in charge in these parts.

Needless to say, I got the message.

I decided that no matter how much I loved having the deer around, if I was ever going to have a garden, I needed to stop encouraging them to drop by for breakfast, lunch, dinner and the occasional midnight snack.

A combination of events happened to change the all-or-nothing banquet for the local deer herds.

First, I stopped feeding them their own 80-pound bags of corn and oats. Second, a new breed of residents began moving into the neighbourhood that believed the first thing they needed to live here – at any cost – was a good fence around their large properties. Despite the semi-rural area never having fences for more than 60 years, the new neighbours all seemed to agree that fences were vital to mark off their territory and keep out the big bad wildlife.

Looking for more information on ground covers? Please check out my other posts on ground covers I use in the woodland garden.

• Bunchberry ideal ground cover

• What is the easiest ground cover to grow?

• Creeping thyme as a ground cover

• Moss and moss-like ground covers

• Virginia Creeper as a vine or ground cover

Okay, for good or bad, that changed the movement of the deer through the neighbourhood. Although my garden remains open to deer, fewer and fewer deer are roaming the neighbourhood and manage to make it into our yard.

I have tried the spray-on, anti-deer repellents that work to some degree. It works unless, of course, you forget to reapply it after a good rain. I swear the deer knew it was safe to move in and enjoy an unlimited supply of fresh greens immediately after a good rain.

The combination of hostas, ferns, cedar trees and a Pagoda dogwood form the perfect border between our property and our neighbour’s backyard.

Deer-resistant hosta can help

Eventually, however, the reduction in deer, and some research into more deer-resistant hosta varieties taught me that there are, in fact, hostas that deer will not devour in a single night’s snack.

The result, I can now grow a few hosta successfully.

In fact, one of the favourite spots in our garden is an area bordering our property and our neighbour’s (see image above) where I have combined a selection of hostas, ferns, wild geranium, sweet woodruff and a couple more ground covers and just let them compete with one another and run as wild as they like. Our neighbours have added to the tapestry with more hostas and ground covers under the shade of our giant Linden tree and their King Crimson maple. They also like the look enough to keep the hostas sprayed regularly enough to send what few deer wander into the yard looking elsewhere for dinner.

In other areas of the garden, large, leather-leaf hostas with thick crinkly leaves stand up to most of the abuse deer can throw at them. By summer’s end, they can be tattered from the sampling deer take over the course of the summer as well as some minor slug damage, but by the end of summer they are still standing and offering at least most of their glorious texture and colour to the garden repertoire.

This scene shows a small blue hosta used as a specimen in the Japanese inspired garden complete with a school of complimentary blue fish swimming through the ferns and epimediums.

What hosta-varieties are safe from deer?

First off, I’m no hosta expert. There are people who dive so deep into hostas that they can recite all 70 species and know the latin names of the more than 3,000 registered varieties.

Once again that’s not me.

These small, bluish hostas have been growing in the dry river bed for more than 10 years and have needed no care or even need for splitting.

I know Emperess Wu is considered to be the biggest at more than 4 feet high with a spread of between 4-5 feet. Heck, its deeply veined leaves stretch out to more than 1.5 feet long and wide. Then you have the mini hostas coming in at a few inches wide with names like Little Squirt Hosta, Munchkin fire Hosta, and Mighty Mouse Hosta.

I’m pretty sure we have the Mighty Mouse variety growing in our dry river bed pathway (wee above). Beautiful little blue hostas that just keep coming up every year with no real need to divide these compact little hostas for the past ten or so years. I would not say they would be safe from deer, but where we have planted them, in a rocky area surrounded by pea gravel and river rocks, means they have never had a single deer try taking a bite out of them.

Around the patio, we have another variegated hosta that has performed admirably and helps light up the dark area. (see image below).

How to grow hosta in the woodland

I’ve never been a proponent of the single specimen approach to gardening, and hostas are treated no different.

In most cases, I like to grow hostas as a ground cover in competition with other plants such as ferns, sweet woodruff etc. This is particularly evident in the space between our property and the neighbour’s.

But there are situations, especially with the larger hostas, that I grow them more as specimens in the garden to show off their size and handsome looks. The large blues and the large variegated hostas work well more as specimens.

We also grow some of our miniature hostas as specimens alongside Japanese Painted ferns and a nice clump of black mondo grass.

Of course, the very nature of hostas lends itself to experimentation. Don’t be afraid to dig these guys up and split them every few years to multiply your numbers and spread them around the garden.

Watch out for slugs, they can be nasty to the aesthetic beauty of your prized hostas.

I will often leave the leaves of the hostas to overwinter and clean them up in the spring, but this can promote slug infestation. So, if you are worried about attracting slugs, be sure to clean up the dead leaves in the fall before they begin to get mushy.

These smaller hostas have been growing in our pea gravel pathway for several years.

You can’t kill hostas

One last thing before I end this post. If you are worried about killing hostas, don’t. These things are tougher than tough. I once left a number of hostas I had dug up during the summer out all winter. And it was a bad winter with prolonged spells of freezing temperatures and plenty of snow even for a Canadian winter.

Sure enough, when spring returned, the bare-root hostas lying upside down in a pile beside the shed, began growing their tender leaves getting ready for summer.

Like I said, these are tough, easy-to-grow show stoppers…. unless, of course, you have lots of deer to feed.