Post written by ACG horticulture apprentice, Josh Nisleit
I have been working with hostas since the moment I started working as the horticulture apprentice in October 2023. Specifically, I began curating the Hosta Walk as my intern project for summer 2024. To start the project, I made some observations about the space. Most of the hostas in our collection were either missing labels or had the wrong ones. We did have a bucket of labels that we knew came from the Hosta Walk, but which plants did they belong to? The space just didn’t feel complete. Some areas were very densely planted, while other areas had no plants at all. Hostas are known for being easy to grow and long-lived, but now I had questions. Did we used to have hostas growing in these empty spaces, and if so, which ones? If there weren’t plants there, which ones should I plant? These questions launched me into a journey of ACG history trying to figure out what the original plans/intentions for the space were.
My first lead was a surprising one: Google Maps. There are images on Google Maps from 2014 that walk through our entire garden. I must admit that the garden looked great, but the images of the Hosta Walk unfortunately were not very helpful. The labels were either too low resolution to read or were blurred out completely by the automatic filter. However, I was able to take some ideas from the original design of the space, which I reincorporated during my planting process.
Going into the project, I didn’t have much knowledge of hostas, so try to imagine my surprise when I learned that the American Hosta Society currently registers 7,400 cultivars. It seemed like an impossible task to identify our plants. How was I supposed to take these plants that looked so similar to me and pick them out of a lineup of thousands? I spent countless hours trying to identify hostas, and it didn’t start great. In the beginning, I would identify a hosta as one cultivar, then think it is a different one 15 minutes later. However, I got a lot better at it the more I practiced. Hostas are identified by a wide variety of features: leaf shape, color, margain, venation, texture, petiole color, flower color, fragrance, plant timing, size, and more. I wouldn’t say that these features make identification easy, but they certainly make it possible.
My next lead was the hosta labels that we had sitting around. Some of our cultivars were spinoffs of other popular cultivars. For example, ‘Sum and Subtle’ is a smaller version of the much more popular ‘Sum and Substance.’ By referencing a book called The Hostapedia written by Mark R. Zilis, I learned that these cultivars were actually propagated by Mark R. Zilis himself. Mark used to own Q & Z Nursery in Illinois, and I assume that we bought hostas from him years ago before he moved his business out of the area. Things were starting to make sense. The reason our hostas don’t quite look like the more common cultivars is because they are spinoff cultivars grown only by Mark Zilis!
This is where the experts come in. In June 2024, after being in contact with them for 6 months or so, the Wisconsin Hosta Society sent a few of their members to the garden to help with this project. The four people I met with worked like a well-oiled machine to identify 20 or so hosta cultivars that stumped me. Two members looked closely at the plants while one member read off potential cultivar names and the last looked up photos and defining characteristics in the “Hosta Library” website. Together, they came to a consensus on each plant fairly quickly. They didn’t even need to reference the Hosta Library to identify some cultivars! They just knew what the cultivar was almost immediately…It was quite impressive.
After identifying as many of the plants as we could, it was time to redesign what we had. My idea was to create a “Hosta of the Year” collection space that showcases plants designated by the American Hosta Growers Association. Every year, one cultivar of hosta is designated as the “Hosta of the Year.” These plants are selected for their interesting traits, stability, ease of growing, availability, and affordability. My intention for this space was to showcase these hostas so visitors know which hostas are best for home gardening. It is my belief that whoever designed the space in the past had a collection like this, but some of the plants had since been lost. However, we did still have some hostas of the year, so it became a matter of finding somewhere to source the rest from.
The Wisconsin Hosta Society suggested some local growers to us, which included Land of The Giants and Uniquely Hostas. To purchase new hostas, we were operating on a budget. The garden is very grateful that the Wisconsin Hosta Society decided to source and donate missing hostas of the year to our collection! Thanks to their generosity, we went to Land of the Giants and purchased other exciting cultivars to level up our hosta game even further. All in all, we acquired 30 new plants, each with unique characteristics that both stand out from and compliment each other in the space. All hostas are interesting in their own way, and it is important to utilize concepts like balance and accent when designing a garden space for them.