Want Easy Plants? Use hostas!

8 varieties of hosta available at Vander Giessen's!

If you're looking for easy plants to use in a shade or morning-sun garden around your house, you've got to have some hostas. Available in dozens--no, make that hundreds--of colors, textures and sizes, hostas are a gardening genre of their own.

In my backyard at home, I have a very shady area made possible by the large chestnut tree just over the fence in my neighbor's yard. It's a beautiful tree, really, but when my wife and I moved into the house, I quickly discovered two problems: 1) The tree drops more than its share of leaves in the fall; and 2) it's tricky to get much of anything to grow in the shade it provides all summer long. So what did I do? I made a hosta garden!

Think about it--hostas give you great, vibrant color even in the shadiest of locations, and at the end of the season when the leaves collect under your trees, you can rake up the hosta foliage right along with them. The flowerbed in my backyard has never been easier to clean up since I planted hostas back there. I just wait until they've died down in the fall--about the same time deciduous trees drop their leaves--and voila, I make one fell swoop through the bed with my rake and avoid having the tedious job of picking leaves out of shrubs as I rake.

If you've never considered the possibility of dedicating a whole flowerbed to hostas, just check out the numerous and beautiful varieties of hosta you can find at Vander Giessen's. You'll love the beauty of the foliage they provide through summer and the ease of cleanup each autumn.