Planning Your Hosta Garden
...is, in my opinion, a total
waste of time. Maybe garden plans are great if you're planting a
perennial garden. And I'd certainly hate to try to plant one of those fancy
herb gardens without drawing it all out on paper. The kind with all
the little trimmed hedges that cris-cross each other back and forth...
Nobody really does that anyway.
Hosta gardens are different.
A real hosta garden can't be planned. A real hosta gardener always
finds new plants every spring. And they're not in the plan. There's
always something new you can't do without, or something you've been wanting
for years that you finally found at a reasonable price. Oops, five new
plants and no room in the plan. The plants just keep getting bigger and
bigger and you have to move them to make room, and then someone comes along
and talks you into dividing one cause they're too cheap to buy their own,
and now you have a small plant in a big space. Planning supposes that at
some time, everything will reach a cosmic equilibrium. Hosta gardens just
don't do that. If you try to plan something like this, you will go
insane. I've seen it happen!
The best way to design a hosta
garden is to buy every hosta that you like, find some empty space in your
garden, and start digging. The only comments I had for this garden was
that there was still a lot of room for miniatures in the front, and of
course I wondered what all that grass was for.
When you think you've run out of
room, take a look at some of those old plants you picked up when you first
started. Maybe it's time to dig up some of those old timers and give
them away so you can replace them with some expensive new introductions.
And of course, if you have any other perennials or shrubs in your garden,
you can always get rid of that stuff.
And after you plant them, stand
back and look at them for a while and if they don't look just right, move
them. That's what real hosta gardeners do.
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