5 hints for planting and maintaining hostas

Hostas are hardy, drought-tolerant perennials, prized more for their large, beautiful leaves than for their trumpetlike flowers. Here are a few growing and maintenance tips for your hosta plants.

Hostas are mainstays for shady borders and pondside beds. They are also effective as a ground cover, and there is no finer plant for growing around the base of a tree.

Because hostas need a period of winter dormancy, they grow well anywhere where the temperature drops below freezing for two to three months of the year.

• While hostas are adaptable, easy-care plants, they will thrive for years if given rich soil and plenty of moisture.

Good nutrition also helps bring out the variegation patterns in varieties with gold- or white-striped leaves.

Hostas are sun-shy; the large leaves they produce to collect light will scorch if exposed to too much sunshine.

• In cool climates, hostas can tolerate about four hours of sun daily; in warm climates, two hours of direct sun is the limit for most types.
• There are a few sun-tolerant varieties that can accept more light.

Hostas are notorious for attracting slugs and snails, which love to hide beneath their lush leaves by day and come out to eat at night.

• To thwart them, try trapping them with beer.
• Or grow hostas in wooden containers encircled with copper tape, which slugs are reluctant to cross. The tape is available from garden supply companies; simply attach several strips all the way around the container.

Keep the hosta bed free of weeds and decomposing leaves.

• The improved growing conditions will strengthen the plants, deprive the pests of nesting sites and make it easier to detect and destroy eggs and adults.
• Where slugs aren't a problem, hostas love a year-round mulch.

Hostas multiply fast, so a planting only a few years old will have plenty of crowns.

• When the first leaves poke through the surface in early spring, use a sharp spade to dig a crown from the outside of the clump.
• You can take divisions from hostas in late summer, too. The leaves of hostas divided late in the season often die, but in spring the plants will emerge magically.