Hosta - The Most Popular Shade Garden Perennial

Hosta - The Most Popular Shade Garden Perennial

By Published May 27, 2015 Updated June 27, 2022

Hostas are the best shade loving plants for the garden. Not only are hostas beautiful but there are thousands of novel colors and leaf forms (blue hostas and gold hosta are the most popular). Plant Delights has bred and evaluated thousands of hostas over the years so we know a good hosta when we see one. We select only the best and most unique cultivars and provide our customers with a large and diverse collection of the very best hosta to grow.

We are constantly rotating the cultivars in our catalog to provide you with the best mix of new and unique hostas along with the classic standards. If you do not see an older cultivar in our catalog this year, just wait, it may rotate back into production in the future. If there is a hosta that you absolutely must have and you cannot find it anywhere, send us an e-mail and if we get enough votes, we may bring it back into production.

Although a hosta can tolerate more sun than most people think, for the best performance, you should grow your hostas in a part-shade garden (in the southeast U.S. at least). Hosta plants produce purple or white flowers during the summer that attract insects and hummingbirds. Sometimes, hosta flowers are deliciously fragrant too (esp. H. plantaginea). Hostas pair well with many garden perennials including carex, ferns, begonia grandis, and polygonatum.

Here at Plant Delights, we have an extensive Hosta breeding program and we always carry some of our most interesting releases as well as hostas from the top Hosta breeders in the US like Hans Hansen and Paul Aden. In fact, PDN is one of the top plant nurseries in the US for Hostas.

Welcome to Plant Delights Nursery at Juniper Level Botanic Gardens. We are a private research and display botanic garden located near Raleigh, North Carolina (USDA Hardiness Zone 7b). Our retail mail order division allows us to make the best perennials from our trials available to gardeners around the world, some of which were developed here, some from our plant explorations, and others from breeders around the world. Between 1988 and 2010, Plant Delights Nursery introduced over 500 new perennial plants to US horticulture. In 2002, we were honored to be recognized by the American Horticulture Society for our lifetime of work in commercial horticulture. This image gallery is but a sampling of the great perennial plants available for gardeners around the world. We do not carry all plants pictured at any one time, but since our mission is to educate and inspire, we hope these images and the linked articles below will expand your garden horizons and interest. You will find an array of other interesting information and fascinating perennials throughout our website...thank you for taking time to visit.

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