New home, new gardens....My first Hallson order!

[Shenandoah]

So this is my first forum post...ever. This spring will be my first spring in my new home and also my first year for my new hosta beds. I have ordered my plants and I am really looking forward to my new gardens. Lots of work to do this spring but I a really excited to finally have a yard to garden in. I have some great plants on order and now just deciding on what other 'must have' hosta I need for my first year garden...suggestions?

[paul_in_mn]

Welcome Shenondoah .....I long to hear you.....Look away, you rollin' river....SORRY .

Here are 10 to consider - tried to give some variety in color, edges, shape, size, edges. Should have a nice solid green as well.

Row1- Liberty and Paradigm
Row2- Krossa Regal and Abiqua Moonbeam
Row3- El Nino and June
Row4- Pineapple Upsidedown Cake and Sagae
Row5- Striptease and Sun Power

[whitewater176]

whatever you ordered from chris you will be thrilled with. Welcome

[impatience]

Since you are ordering from Chris you have that important issue out of the way. Next...be sure to prepare your beds well. That was the biggest mistake I made starting out. I skimped on preparation in all the excitement.

You will find lots of information on this forum. You are already on the right track for making a beautiful garden in your new home. Congratulations and welcome.

imp

I didn't mention that you need 'June' (June is a must in every garden), 'Sagae' , 'Striptease', 'Abiqua Drinking Gourd', 'Fragrant Bouquet' or progeny for starters. What have you ordered?

[rosemarie]

Welcome Shenandoah!( I do love that name). Are you kidding? Anything you order from Chris you will be happy with.And worry free.Any time some one asks the best on line nuseries to order from, Hallson is either at the top of the list or very near. NOw that you have been reassured, have fun!! This is a great place to be, alot of knowledgable people. Keep us posted!

[largosmom]

Excellent and I know you won't be disappointed. Congrats on the new home, new gardens and first post!

[thy]

Gongratulations with the new home and garden and welcome to the forums.
Bying from Hallsons give you some good sized hostas right from the start and some who are tistes garden worthy and HVX free.

Here are 3 polls showing the most wanted and best hostas from members on this forum
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=53527&p=467203#p467203
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=33691&p=283410&hili ... st#p283410
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=50508&start=40

If I was to start all over I would get some of the fast growing hostas like Guacamole; Stained Glass or Regal Slendor all from the same family all fragrant and at the same time start some of the real slow ones like tokudama 'Aureonebulosa' and tokudama Flavocircinalis.
Kiwi Full Monthy is one of my favorites with June, Regal Splendor,Emerald Ruff Cut, Clovelly, Deep Blue Sea and Queen of the seas, just to mention a few

Pia

[isadora]

If I had to start over in a new garden........it would be an awful temptation to list the new hostas that I love,,,,,,,,but I think if I were advising a new hosta grower, I would go for some of the old, tried and true first, for the first ten:

June
Halcyon
First Frost
Fujibotan (have to have those double flowers!)
Plantaganea (And those huge fragrant white flowers!)
Regal Splendor
Blue Angel
Golden Tiara
Kabitan for mini ground cover
Montana Aureomarginata

Then I would add from there. Liberty, Guacamole, Stained Glass, Sweet Home Chicago, Sum and Substance...... Wait, I think that's how I started...........

[putnamgardens]

How cool is that? I'm just the opposite. Old House. Established garden and I just mailed off an order from Hallson's and it's not my first nor will it be my last! I found myself ordering more Lily bulbs but I did buy three hosta too. I'm sure you won't be disappointed. Congrats and new home and garden. Enjoy!!! Later, Love, Lisa P.S. Welcome as a new post-er too

[jgh]

Oh... there is so much I'd like to say... it is such a rare thing you have - a blank canvas and virtually limitless pallete from which to work. If I ever write a garden book... or perhaps a chapter of a garden book... this is the topic I'd explore. I'll try to boil it down to a few thoughts.

The best single piece of advice is about preparation. If necessary, pot up the plants you get from Chris and elsewhere... because you only get one chance to properly prepare a new garden bed. The temptation is to plant and then try to amend the soil later. It works - but overall you come out ahead to hold off on the planting until the whole bed is properly prepared.

Perhaps equally important to soil preparation is mental preparation. Stop. Think. Give yourself time to imagine. Yes, you can always move things around... but the "bones" of your garden plan are hard to change after you've got things in the ground. Stop. Think some more. Have a vision.

Along that line, another nice feature about potting your plants when you get them... you can move them around in the prepared garden before planting, imagining the interplay of the different plants.

I like Pia's idea... some fast growing, like the Guacamole, Avocado, Holy Mole family - and luckily that group is not only fast, but very nice with the added benefit of the lovely fragrant flowers...

and definitely - tokudama flavocircinalis, Bright Lights... at least a couple of the notoriously slow tokudama family that will eventually be among the finest in the garden and well worth the wait - may as well get them in the ground now!

Leave room in your landscape for the expansions you will undoubtedly make if you have the gardening bug - but take some time to lay out your first beds. Make a real plan, with cirlces and spaces marked, based on your vision. Think about heights, but also leaf textures and bloom seasons. Your first bed should have enough variety that there is something there to delight you from the earliest spring right through the hard frosts.

Think in four dimentions. Height, width, depth... and time. Accents change from week to week in a happy garden... the showpiece of spring becomes a ground cover in August, while a "sleeper" all season becomes the star of the late season garden.

Don't forget that a carefully placed shrub or three can be a great addition to a flower garden, giving some height and texture and maybe some partial shade for some particular plants in your hot Chicago summer days... and a visual barrier... Even in a perfectly flat suburban lot, the use of well placed shrubs can create visual barriers that give the sense of wandering around to other viewpoints.

And do think in terms of viewpoints. In the old days, Disneyland and several of the National Parks had spots marked as the ideal places to take photographs from - places you would get the same exact picture as all the post cards in the gift shops... except you might be able to put your dog Suzie in the foreground. Silly idea in retrospect - but I have spots in my garden that I stop at when I lead people through that I think display certain things particularly well. You can create those spots - then put a love seat or a couple of chairs and a little table for drinks and snacks or maybe just a single stool... spots to sit and think... and sometimes to just sit...

And garden art - accents. I'm not a fan of monumental garden art - unless you have monumental space to work with. In a typical garden, a huge statue or sculpture can take away from the plantings. On the other hand, we love having a variety of things... a pump, a bell, a broken Mexican vase, a bust of King Tut... scattered throughout the gardens. People who visit have different tastes, but many who visit talk about our non-flora accents long after their interest in hostas is exhausted. An old gazing ball that lost its mirror coating got covered in pennies with a hot glue gun last spring, thanks to my daughter. Silly - but it got lots of comments! Just keep the accents in proportion to the plantings.

You are posting on a hosta forum... if so, you may be forced to make a decision early. I am a hosta nut, so many of my gardens are virtual "monocultures" - displays of one species of plant. What follows might be considered heresy by some of the other hosta nuts here, but...

That kind of garden takes on a museum quality - a display of a collection. I have often said that in pure gardening terms, our gardens uses to be better/more attractive because they were balanced shade gardens that integrated hostas with the many other partial-sun plants available... cimicifugas, rodgersias, aruncus, and so on. As my hosta collecting got out of control (roughly 800 different cultivars, maybe 3000 plants) I had to remove non-hosta plants to make room to display the expanding collection. So - we have a nice hosta collection and we display it well, given our constraints of poverty and space... but I have no doubt we would have more attractive gardens if we jetisoned 1/2 to 2/3 of the hostas and created more mixed plantings.

OK... got to stop somewhere... there's some ideas for you!

[jgh]

Oh... I forgot one of the things we recommend a lot. We find that having one large garden bed can be intimidating. People often say things like "I planned to get out there and work on the garden, but I just didn't have enough time to tackle that big a job..." We created a way to dodge our natural tendency to procrastinate and to be overwhelmed by big jobs.

We created a bunch of little gardens rather than a few big ones. In the back yard (the South side) I think we have beds S1 through S23. On the West side we have W1-W9. Some of them are larger, some smaller. But these small gardens allow pathways among the gardens creating lots of different views... and intimacy... and little spots to hide a piece of art or a bench... and when I go out to weed, I can say I'm going to weed that one raised bed, S8. I know if I was facing weeding the whole garden, it would be overwhelming - we never have everything properly weeded at any given time - but if I'm looking at one bed that will take an hour or two... that I can get myself to do, even after a busy day.

Pathways can be simple wood chips, or bricks/pavers... we even use railroad ties as walkway in one part of our garden. (Actually, used railroad ties play a huge role in our landscaping as they are the cheapest building material available in America... we also used them stacked as a (bizarre) version of split rail fences... anyway, some of our paths are more formally paved, some are just wood chips... and some are the small remnant of the orginal lawn - it takes four minutes to start the mower and trim those pathways...

[ViolaAnn]

Welcome Shenondoah and congratulations on the new house and gardens.

One thing, don't do TOO much the first year. It's a good time to enjoy the property and watch the light conditions in various parts of the yard and make plans for the future. I'd work on preparing good beds and planning.

How much space do you have? If it's a smallish city lot, you won't be able to have too many really large hostas. Research them and decide on a few really special ones and then look at smaller varieties for the rest of the garden. (Mind you, I hope you have lots of space - what a joy it would be to have a large empty canvas).

Spend some time on-line looking at hosta pictures and characteristics. Remember that what they will look like at maturity may be very different from what they look like at the nursery.

Other than that, there are some very good recommendations above. Have fun with those gardens.

Ann

[rosemarie]

Alot of good advice here. I have about 3 1/2 acres . Part of it is in Christmas trees that my neighbors have planted in some experimental trees from Turkey(?) that are supposed to handle our high water table here.(You can dig a post hole and get water) and I have a grove of trees that hold my shade garden.(I have to get some pictures this year!!) That is why my lables are printed on both sides because.I have 'islands' scattered around in the trees.So I wanted to be able to read them from both sides. ( If I am ever able to get outside again!) but the Swallows are in this morning, so spring is supposed to be here. I also get some good 'dope' from this club, there are so many things to learn.

[jgh]

I was just out walking various beds that have just emerged from their blankets of snow... and experienced a all-too-common experience. I looked at stuff I did in the late fall and said to myself "What in the heck did I put there."

Which brings me to my second best suggestion - after preparing the soil really well.

Keep good records. Keep lists of what you buy, when, from where, and how much you paid. You think you will remember - you won't. Keep maps of everything you plant. Take digital photos to go with the maps. Scan everything into your computer - then back it up... then back it up again.

My earliest records made it through three computers, but became unusable and now send the signal "corrupted" - not one of my computer backups... ALL of them.

Sure hope I can find last fall's maps!

[rosemarie]

I am having a similar problem. I had 'maps' of all my islands, the islands were numbered(1-18), and lists of what was in them, plus pictures of all the Hostas so I could remember exactly what they all looked like over the winter. I was like the guys who wear belts AND suspenders,rather be safe than sorry! But things being what they were, I wasn't able to work in my yard the way I usually did. I finally got sprinklers in last year, I have not been able to get out in my trees to check on things. I know I have lost some plants, but just how many I don't know.But with all the records I kept, I should be able to figure it out. ANd this weather year has been so crazy, it may be July before I can get out side! T'oday we had rain , hail, a funnel cloud some where around here( shades of Aumsville) plus a little sunshine(just enough to make you want more) and the snow level is supposed to come down to 1000 feet tonight. That means snow in the foot hills of Portland and maybe in the foot hills of Aumsville! The knees and ankles just keep on barking at me and it just keeps raining. But I know Spring is out there somewhere and I know I am not alone in wanting to get outside. So I will just keep on hanging in there along with every one else . Oh yes, I got three Hosta: Paisley Print , MIdnight at the Oasis and Sharp Dressed Man and they are all beautiful and growing nicely. They are in pots, sitting just inside the sliding door on our south side where they get what sun we get. As soon as this #%&%* cold system passes maybe I can set them out on the deck temporarily.

[kaylyred]

You know what's almost worse than not knowing what's growing (and where) in your own garden?

Today I was going through close-up photographs of hostas in my yard. I only have 40 varieties, so I know what each of them are and where they're planted--40 are pretty easy for me to keep track of (plus I have a spreadsheet.) But then I came across a photo of this really pretty gold hosta with a light green margin and cordate leaves. I thought, "Wow, that's a pretty hosta, but...when did I buy that? And where is it growing in my garden?"

I figured I must have bought it toward the end of the season or something when my head was exploding with all things hosta and, for some dumb reason, hadn't remembered buying or planting it. And I felt really dumb.

Then I looked a little closer at the photo. "That doesn't look like my soil," I thought. (Is it silly to know what your soil looks like? I don't think so!) Then the pieces came together. I was looking at pictures that I'd taken..in my Mom's garden!

The tag is covered. Anyone have a guess offhand as to which hosta this might be?

[R. Rock]

Karen,

Does 'Dance w/ Me' ring a bell?

The Designer Hosta tag kinda looked like 'L. Shoremaster'

[kaylyred]

You know, I bet it is 'Dance with Me.' As I was looking at it I kept thinking it looked so familiar and that I should know what it is. I don't have 'Dance With Me' in my garden, but I'll keep an eye on the one my mom has and maybe that one will have to join the ever-growing Must Have List.

[Schattenfreude]

Could it be one of the Tiara hostas?

Kevin

[kaylyred]

I know for absolute certain that it's not one of the Tiara series. (I have several of them because I like them so much.) I think Rick might have pegged it correctly as 'Dance With Me.'