Something I've Always Wondered About...

[Shade Tolerant]

Hostas like Gunther's Prize, Winter Lightning, etc. those with heavily speckled, streaked and mottled foliage. How would one ever know if one of these in your garden developed HVX? I mean it wouldn't be readily apparent. Unless you had it tested you'd never know

[John]

If one is familiar with that their hosta is supposed to look like, HVX would still be obvious.

[Shade Tolerant]

I'm not so sure John. The mottled looking ones like GP and WL would be hard to spot HVX readily, to me anyway. I think I would have to inspect them daily with a magnifying glass

[Chris_W]

I think I would have to agree with Eileen partly and John partly. It would be tougher to spot in those particular plants, but maybe not impossible. You would really have to look closely and the virus might not show until it got REALLY bad, where the tissue was collapsing. In the case of Winter Lightning, you might start to see dark green bleeding in the solid yellow margin.

The most common symptom I'm seeing in plants people have been bringing me to try and ID for them is strange bumps, sort of like random warts. The color change everyone is looking for is getting to be less and less noticable in green and green and white variegated plants. That "ink bleed" everyone watches for only shows up well in the yellow tissue.

The test strips from AGDIA really aren't that costly, especially when you compare it to the price of some of the more exotic plants themselves, so a random test once in a while wouldn't be a bad idea on those if you have the virus around. Actually I think if everyone started testing a bunch of their hostas they might be surprised by some of the test results as symptoms just aren't that obvious in a LOT of different hostas, and I think the virus is deeper into gardens than people might realize. At least that is what I'm noticing when people bring me leaves to ID, they bring ones that are clearly virus infected to me, but to the untrained eye you would never see it