Rain has made this a banner spring for hearty hostas

In an already notable garden year influenced by a mild winter and remarkable for the speed at which plants have sprung to life, there is one plant in my garden that is pulling focus from everything else. The hostas are the best they’ve ever been.

Hostas always look their best in late spring, before their foliage gets tattered by weather, slugs or nibbled on by deer, but they have outdone themselves this year. They are the biggest I’ve ever seen, some hitting at thigh height and boldly taking over pathways they have only ever skirted the edges of.

I take no credit for this incredible growth. Mother Nature deserves all the praise for this particular plant success because she has delivered inch after inch of rain at just the right time.

The lesson from this is not to just wait for a particularly rainy spring —although there’s something to be said about working with the weather you’re dealt with — it’s that the best way to grow big hostas is with water, and lots of it.

Although the hostas are huge and beautiful this year, what is perhaps more impressive is how good hostas look even in an average year with little to no pampering. When I think of easy-care plants in the garden, hostas are near the top of the list. If you factor in hardiness — they’ll survive any Wisconsin winter — and their bold texture, which is lacking in most gardens, it’s hard not to think of them as one of best plants in the garden.

But they aren’t perfect. Hostas are apparently a delicacy among deer that can take a plant from one with perfect foliage to mere stems in a single nighttime snack session. And slugs seem to find happy homes in the curved stems and voraciously eat holes in leaves.

Variety selection can go a long way to minimizing the damage of both. Thick-leaved varieties, which often tend toward the blue end of the color spectrum, seem to be of little interest to slugs and less tasty to deer.

Gardeners who are willing to take preventative steps to protect hostas will have more assurance that the bold foliage will remain looking great. For slugs, that includes using traps, including the Wisconsin-appropriate beer trap, which works well but is unpleasant to empty even if the gardener is drinking the rest of the bait. Slug baits that use iron phosphate are pet and wildlife safe and very effective, although regular reapplication is required.

Deer are more problematic, although regular applications of liquid deer repellent go a long way so long as a gardener is wiling to keep up with a rigid application schedule or take their chances with a potential nighttime deer buffet.

So far I’ve been able to stave off both critters, and the garden is looking better for it. And now that I realize how much of a difference a lot of water can make to hostas, I know exactly what I need to do to get the ‘Jurassic Park’ hosta I stupidly planted near a tree to get closer to achieving its potential size of more than 3 feet tall by 6 feet wide — give it water. Lots and lots of water.