White Feather Hosta | Unique Color For Your Garden
Gardening is a splendid way to spend relaxing time in the outdoors, and a diverse and well groomed garden adds a certain splendor and enjoyment to your yard. Sure, it can be a lot of work, but it’s rewarding too, right?
When your plants and flowers start to bloom, and the color comes out; shades of red, blue, and yellow abound, but deep whites can be hard to come by. Enter the White Feather Hosta, a beautiful plant with delicate white foliage.
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Hosta, sometimes called Plantation Lilies, are a popular plant for providing variety to any garden. The Hosta plant is not only appealing for its cone shaped blooms, but its variation in foliage color adds to its character and beauty. Hosta is relatively easy to grow, and does well from full shade to part sun areas.
White Feather Hosta | Unique Color For Your Garden
What Makes Hosta A Good Choice?
One of the best characteristics of the Hosta plant is its tolerance to various levels of exposure to sunlight. Hosta, particularly the White Feather variety, make excellent plants for adding light color to full shade areas, which typically planted with dark greens, blues, and purples. The White Feather variety is a fairly small plant, but a good focal point for any garden or flower bed.
Unlike flowering plants with green foliage, White Feather Hosta provides color to your garden from the spring through summer and into fall. It emerges with white foliage in the spring, and transitions to a blend of green and cream colors, finally blooming early summer through early fall. The foliage is low maintenance and the flowers make a unique addition to summer bouquets.
What You’ll Need for Growing Healthy Plants
Hosta is a widely cultivated genus that is native to northeast Asia. Though it’s many cultivars (over 40 different species and thousands of named varieties) are easy to grow world-wide, there are some things you’ll need to know about if you add them to your garden.
- Where to find them (the White Feather variety is only one among thousands)
- Space for growing them (gardens, planters, flower beds)
- What you’ll need for preparing garden soil (tools, soil amendments, and how)
- When, where, and how to plant or transplant them
- Watering requirements
- Fertilizer requirements
- Pests to watch for and pest control measures
You will put a lot of time and effort into your garden, so you will want to be sure you start out with the best plants, and grow them in the most optimal conditions if you want them to thrive. Use the following steps as a guide.
#1 - Sourcing Your Plants
White Feather Hosta is a rare variety that you likely won’t find at your local garden store or plant nursery. It’s perennial, so once it’s established, it will enter dormancy for the winter and re-emerge in the spring. It can be grown from seeds, but they are even harder to find than the plant.
While nurseries are not likely to keep the plant in stock, a good nursery can be a good place to start looking for a source. Your local nursery may be able to special order it, or at least give you an idea of where you can buy it. You may have to ask your way through a couple of levels of nursery workers to get to someone knowledgeable enough, but it’s worth the effort if you can find a local source.
Your most likely source for this rare plant is likely going to be the internet. Because of it’s rarity and low demand, you most likely will only find it available in root form. Many perennial plants are shipped as a mass of live roots packaged in moist soil that you can plant in your garden with good results.
Be sure to look for reviews, comments, or customer feedback that can vouch for any online source. Use effective Google search terms like site:org "White Feather Hosta" to locate possible sources.
#2 - Before You Plant
Before you plant your Hosta, you will need an appropriate location picked out, and your soil prepared. Keep in mind that White Feather Host, is a small plant, and will thrive in shady areas but it won’t do well in full sun. You will need to select a location with well drained soil, slightly higher than the surrounding ground level (raised flower beds also make a good place to plant Hosta).
Once you have a location, you will need to prepare the garden soil with a soil amendment rich in organic material or compost, blended with sand and loam. Use a shovel for digging into and turning the earth, then add your soil amendment and use a garden tiller to evenly blend it into the native dirt.
Your finished planting area should be a raised mix of roughly one part soil amendment to two parts native earth; and because mature plants are fairly small, plan on area to accommodate 2 to 3 plants.
#3 - Planting
You have already done all of the hard work; actually planting your Hosta is easy but it must be done right to ensure well established plants. Planting will require digging the hole, preparing and placing the root mass, backfilling, applying fertilizer, watering-in, and applying mulch.
Step 1: Dig out a hole in well packed, amended soil that is twice as large as your Hosta root mass. Form a well compacted, raised, mound of soil in the bottom of the hole.
Step 2: Prepare the root mass by trimming off the ends of individual roots, and place the root mass atop the mound in the hole. Place the plant just low enough so that all of the top of the root mass will be covered with no more than an inch of soil when back filled.
Step 3: Backfill the hole with amended soil, compacting the soil around the roots as you fill. The compacted soil should end up slightly above the surrounding ground, with a ring of soil built up to form a water reservoir around the plant.
Step 4: Apply approximately a teaspoon full of 10-10-10 fertilizer to the soil surface around the plant
Step 5: Add water, backfilling ss needed as soil settles. Repeat until soil no longer settles, is slightly raised above surrounding ground, and slightly below the surrounding reservoir.
Step 6: Lightly spread mulch or compost around the plant.
Here is a short video to show you how it’s done.
#4 - Follow-Up Care and Pests
Hosta are fairly hardy when it comes to vulnerability to both disease and pests. A healthy plant will tend to stay healthy if it is planted properly, watered properly, and fertilized properly, and pests are limited plant eating animals like deer or rabbits, and easily controlled by fencing in your yard. Snails or slugs may be an occasional problem; simply manually remove them.
The most common threats to the health of a Hosta plant are either excessive water or not enough water, excessive fertilizer, and too much direct afternoon sun. The soil around your plants should be kept moist, but not soaked, easily accomplished by occasional watering and keeping a ground cover of mulch around the plant. Fertilize lightly, in the spring or the fall, using a half a pound of 10-10-10 fertilizer per 100 square feet of ground.
Enjoy Your Plants
The full beauty of your mature plants will be most evident 2 to 3 years after planting. At this time they should be full and well formed, with dense foliage and lots of color. Getting your plants to this stage of growth is easy if you follow the guidelines we’ve mentioned.
It’s important to locate your Hosta in adequate shade, properly prepare the soil before planting, and ensure plants get adequate moisture without over watering. Once established, flatten out the reservoir around the plant. Be sure to share your comments and thoughts about this amazing plant.
About the Author Laura Bennett
Hello, I’m Laura Bennett. I love nature especially when it comes to flowers and different kinds of plants. I started a very small garden behind my house and I named it Humid Garden. So, I created this blog to provide aspiring and inspiring thoughts about gardening for gardeners and anyone who has the intention of keeping a garden.
