Hostas in Florida

I had the pleasure of attending the Garden Bloggers Fling in Minneapolis and it opened up the wound on my sore spot for hostas. While some Florida nurseries may be selling hosta, they just aren’t the plants you think of from the midwest or the northeast. These puny plants would be quickly scrubbed from most gardens!  Below is a photo of the “hostas” being sold at a local nursery. They really don’t look like the beautiful plants in the other photos, do they?

Dennis Carey and Tony Avent from Plant Delights Nursery shared information on the science behind our crappy hostas on their site.  “As a general rule, Hostas prefer climates with cold winters and warm summers. For gardeners in southern climates of Zone 9-10, picking the right Hosta can be a daunting task. Most Hostas must have a minimum winter dormancy requirement of 30 days at temperatures below 43 degrees F.”  To give that perspective, central Florida averages 250 to 300 of these “chill hours” each year. 30 days straight of these temperatures would be 1290 hours.

Hostas are beautiful landscape plants. Their thick rosettes of leaves range in color from white, to lime green to a frosty blue and everything in between. Leaves range in size from huge 18″ wide cultivars to miniature hostas with leaves less than an inch in diameter. I truly think they are best appreciated when massed together with many different cultivars. Whites look brighter next to dark greens and all the different shades creates a rainbow of green.

 

So, I share with your these photos of an amazing garden I was lucky to visit. It wasn’t even on our tour, but you can’t keep gardeners away when they see something this beautiful!  This couple has more than 780 different hosta cultivars.  It really is almost too much to take if you miss these plants.

This Minnesota garden is the stuff dreams are made of for gardeners…

It really is too bad hostas in Florida are such a flop…  Perhaps my next post should be on plants to replace your beloved hostas in Florida gardens?