Hostas are extremely resilient plants. In the Niagara region, they can be transplanted pretty much any time the ground is not frozen. I have transplanted them in late spring, summer and fall, and they are one of the few plants I would be comfortable moving even in the middle of summer.
That doesn’t mean every time is equally good.
Fall is a great time to transplant hostas. Fall is already a good time to transplant many plants. Temperatures are lower, plants are less stressed, and if you transplant six to eight weeks before the first hard frost, they have time to anchor their root systems before winter.
But there is another reason I like fall specifically for hostas.
You can still see them.
If you split hostas in early spring, unless you know your garden very well or have a photographic memory, it can be difficult to remember which little hosta shoots correspond to which foliage later in the season. If you transplant them in late spring or summer, you can see the foliage, but the leaves have already formed. After splitting and transplanting, you may spend the rest of the summer looking at a somewhat misshapen hosta.
In fall, there is a useful window. The foliage is still there, so you can see its colour, size, texture and pattern, but soon the hostas will turn yellow, wither and collapse for winter anyway. You can design with this year’s foliage without sacrificing much of the garden’s nice-looking time.
Hostas are forgiving enough that you don’t have to wait for this perfect window. I once had a hosta division that we didn’t know where to plant. Frost came, then snow, and the hosta spent the entire winter sitting above ground. The following spring, it came back without an issue.
I wouldn’t recommend that as a planting technique. But it gives you an idea of what kind of plant we’re working with.
Start With What You Have
One of the main reasons I make hosta gardens is because there are already too many hostas.
A hosta has been growing in the same place for years. It has become too large for the space. Several hostas have grown into each other. They need thinning or splitting.
So now what do you do with all the extra hostas?
You can make another garden.
You can also make a hosta garden entirely from nursery plants. But there is something particularly approachable about designing with plants that are already growing in front of you.
Start by looking around your garden. Where are the hostas? How big are they? Which ones need splitting? Which ones don’t? Which ones were recently planted and should be left alone?
This gives you your palette.
Hostas come in an enormous range of forms. There are massive, large-leaved hostas that become strong visual masses in the garden. There are blue hostas that can create a steel-blue wash of colour. There are green and white variegated hostas, green and yellow ones, glossy leaves and matte leaves, crinkled edges and smooth ones. There are tiny hostas like ‘Blue Mouse Ears’, and narrow-leaved hostas that create a much more vertical accent.
I find the white and yellow variegation particularly defining. I often choose one or the other. In my mind, they perform a similar function: they are the light colour.
Once you start looking at hostas this way, you’re no longer just looking at a collection of plants. You’re looking at colour, texture, height, visual weight and mass.
Look at the Garden Too
Then look at the space where the hosta garden will go.
Is it an existing garden with other plants? Is it a new area? Does it need clearing or weeding? Is the boundary determined by the shadow of a tree above where grass no longer wants to grow?
Clear the area first. Remove branches, pine cones and other debris. I will sometimes amend the soil with compost or triple mix if the bed needs refreshing, but hostas are forgiving and this isn’t always necessary.
Before doing much else, spend a moment experiencing the garden the way you will actually experience it.
If it’s a garden you walk through, walk through it. Notice which angles matter.
If it’s beside a sitting area, sit where you are going to sit.
If you see it from inside the house, go inside and look through the windows.
You can take photographs if that’s helpful.
What matters is: what can you see, and from where?
That will help determine what you want to put where.
Design With the Hostas
This is where making a hosta garden gets interesting.
I often don’t design these gardens on paper first. I design with the plants themselves.
I dig up some hostas, split them, and physically place them where I think they should go. Then I step back and look.
If I like the effect, great.
If I don’t, I move them.
There are many ways to organize a hosta garden. Two gardens I made this year ended up working very differently.
In one smaller garden, I noticed that a medium-sized hosta with white margins naturally drew my eye. It also highlighted a darker corner. So I started with those.
I scattered five of these lighter hostas where I wanted attention to go. Then I took three much larger green hostas and placed them behind the lighter ones to create larger anchoring masses. Between the features, I interspersed some pure green hostas to fill the space.
In this garden, I started with the plants that attracted attention and built the supporting structure around them.
You don’t have to do it that way. You could start with the background structure first.
Another hosta garden I made this year worked almost entirely through masses.
Closest to the walking path was a large mass of very small hostas with rounded leaves. Beside them, curving away, was a wash of blue hostas. Behind those was a smaller grouping of medium-to-large green hostas, and behind everything was a mass of very large-leaved hostas.
There wasn’t really a single hosta acting as the focal point. The interest came from the masses themselves: their different heights, colours and leaf sizes, and especially the curved lines where one mass met another.
What your hosta garden looks like depends on how much space you’re working with, what effect you want, and what plant material you actually have available.
Dig and Divide
Once you have a loose idea of what you’re making, you can start digging.
For smaller hostas, I prefer a garden fork when possible. It can lift the plant while doing relatively little damage to the roots. Very large, well-established hostas can have substantial root systems and may require a heavy-duty shovel.
Once the hosta is out of the ground, it can be divided.
I often use two garden forks. I insert the first into the clump where I want the split to happen, then put the second fork immediately beside it, back-to-back. I use the forks as levers, moving the handles apart and across each other to gradually pry the root mass apart.
This lets some of the roots untangle themselves rather than simply cutting straight through everything.
For finer work, I also use my Ho-Mi to help pry divisions apart.
How far you divide the hosta depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.
If you want an immediate effect, keep larger clumps.
If you’re creating a large mass and want consistent coverage, smaller divisions may make more sense. A hosta can sometimes be divided remarkably far, down to small rooted sections with only a few leaves. Those small plants will expand over the coming years.
There is also future maintenance to consider. If you don’t want to split the hostas again anytime soon and don’t mind waiting for the garden to fill in, starting with smaller clumps gives them more room and more time before they need dividing again.
The hosta itself also gets a say. Some clumps fall naturally into three, four or five pieces. Others have grown together into an unwieldy root mass.
Work with what you have.
Place Before You Plant
I tend to work through the garden in categories.
If I’m using light-coloured hostas as attention points, I might dig and divide those first. I place them in the new garden and look. If I need another one, I go back and get another one.
Then I move on to the large hostas.
Then the fillers.
The designer’s eye is involved throughout the entire process. I’m not gardening first and designing separately. I’m gardening and designing at the same time.
There is an internal sense of balance involved. I have some idea of how densely planted I want the garden to be and how much space I eventually want to fill. I also imagine what the next layer will look like before I add it.
So there is an interplay between what I imagine the garden will be and what actually happens.
Imagine. Place. Look.
Does the actual garden resemble what you imagined?
If it does, keep going.
If it doesn’t, move something.
This is part of what makes a hosta garden such an approachable design exercise. You don’t need to be able to visualize the entire finished garden perfectly in your head or represent it completely on paper. The plants are sitting there in front of you. You can move them around until you like what you see.
Plant What the Garden Allows
Ideally, once you know where a hosta is going, dig a hole approximately one-and-a-half to two times the size of its root ball. Amend the soil at this point if necessary, place the hosta, backfill, and keep the crown—the point where the leaves and roots meet—approximately level with the surrounding soil.
A simple way to think about it is to plant the hosta about as deeply as it was growing before.
But gardens aren’t ideal.
One of the mass plantings I described was underneath established evergreen trees. The soil was full of roots.
Instead of digging perfect holes with a shovel, I sometimes used a smaller shovel or my Ho-Mi to pick my way into whatever spaces were available between the roots.
Sometimes the hosta ended up six inches to the left of where I had imagined it. Sometimes a foot to the right.
That’s okay.
I will occasionally prune away small root clusters if necessary, but I won’t cut through a substantial tree root just to put a hosta exactly where I had planned.
The real garden has the final say.
No matter what a written design says, or a drawing says, or a 3D render says, the final conditions are the actual garden.
Everything else is a dream waiting to happen and to see how it interacts with reality.
If the hosta has to move six inches to the left, that’s not the wrong spot.
It is the spot.
And that’s what we’re working with in this garden.
Water
Hostas are resilient, but resilient plants can still show signs of stress.
If you’re transplanting during heat or drought, hostas will wilt. Water them deeply immediately after planting, especially if the soil is dry.
A few follow-up waterings over the next several days can help, followed by deeper watering roughly once a week while the plants establish. But watering always depends on conditions. Pay attention to the soil, weather and plants rather than following a schedule blindly.
Wilting is a pretty clear indication that the plant needs water.
Fall planting can be particularly forgiving. Depending on rainfall and conditions, a couple of good waterings may be enough before the foliage dies back for winter. Summer transplants generally need more attention if you want the foliage to remain presentable for the rest of the season.
Then let the garden grow.
A tiny division becomes a clump. The spaces close. The masses become clearer. Eventually, some of those hostas will become large enough that they need splitting again.
And then you have more hostas.
Which means you can make another garden.