Flowers of all kinds are bright spots in any landscape, but to really bring a garden to life, you need rich foliage texture. Hostas, hardy perennial plants grown for their foliage rather than for their flowers, produce opulent mounds of beautifully textured leaves that bring magical stateliness to a flower bed.

Luxuriously leafy hostas transform bare spots under trees into cool tableaus, add drama along a front walk and emphasize the transition to a garden gate. They are also striking and distinguished specimens in pots. They are the champions of shade gardens -- and they're surprisingly adaptable in sunny places, too.

"We are getting better hostas all the time," says Bob Olson, who grows about 200 different hostas in his garden near Minneapolis. Olson is a past president of the American Hosta Society and has been the editor of the AHS Journal for almost 20 years. Hostas with red stems (also called petioles) are one of the latest developments in the world of hostas, Olson says, but hybridizers are also introducing more giant hostas, which may grow 40 inches tall or more and up to 5 feet across, and there is great interest in tiny hostas no more than 6 inches tall, too.

Olson planted his first hostas as problem solvers, to dress up a garden bed around the base of a tree on his property. "Then I heard about a guy in another city -- he had 450 varieties of hosta for sale. I was stunned, and I was captivated," Olson says. He fell for a big hosta priced at $40 but couldn't bring himself to make the investment. His wife talked him into it, and the hosta (H. montana Aureomarginata), remains one of his favorites.

There are about 8,000 different named hostas today, and some gardeners take that as a challenge. Most cost $15 or less. At one time, Olson's hosta collection included close to 400 hostas. "But my garden looked like a row crop. My wife said it looked like a stamp collection," Olson says. That's when he made a decision. "I realized that the best gardens I had seen were where people displayed their hostas well." Every beautiful plant benefits by handsome companion plants, and every garden needs variety.

Olson now grows peonies, lilies and lots of annual flowers side by side with his hostas in a carefully designed garden that seems to embrace his backyard. "I had to put a lot of hostas out for adoption," he says, "but my garden was much better once I did that."

Interest in miniature hostas has skyrocketed in the past few years. It took off when a sweet little hosta with cupped leaves called Blue Mouse Ears came on the market. The 8-inch hosta launched a wave of hybridizing that has led to the introduction of dozens of different "mouse" hostas, including Frosted Mouse Ears, Mighty Mouse and Mouse Trap.

Mini hostas have correspondingly small root systems, and it's best to grow them in small pots for a year or so, Olson says. "Then you might put them in the ground," he suggests. Some gardeners grow their mini hostas in planters, to show them off together, like miniature gardens. One of the hottest new minis, Olson says, is Miniskirt, which has a ruffled-edged leaf.

Choosing among the great variety of hostas is part of the fun. When you're shopping -- hostas are widely available at garden shops, big-box stores, and through mail-order specialists -- look for something distinctive, Olson suggests. "A great hosta is one you can look at from across the garden and identify it. There are too many that nobody can tell apart."

Hostas are hardy perennial plants that live for years. It's important to allow them room to grow. Big specimens such as Great Expectations or Blue Hawaii are at their best after about three years. Some gardeners like to divide plants after that, but unless conditions change in your garden, you really don't need to go to all that trouble. You can just stand back and admire them.

SIDEBAR

Growing Hostas

Hostas are terrific shade garden plants, but don't expect them to flourish in the very darkest corners of the garden. They tolerate shade well, but they flourish in morning light, dappled light or bright, indirect light. Many hostas look great in sunny spots, especially if they are planted in soil enhanced with compost and are watered consistently throughout the growing season.

-- Plant hostas in well-drained soil, firm the soil around them and water well. Mulch around your plants with compost or leaf mold to help reduce evaporation from the soil. As your hostas grow, they will shade the soil, and weeds should not be a problem.

-- Fertilize hostas with an all-purpose fertilizer once a year, in spring. Water well after fertilizing.

-- Established hostas planted in light shade are surprisingly drought-tolerant, but regular watering will encourage growth. Large-leaf hostas, in particular, lose a lot of moisture through normal transpiration and need extra moisture. During dry spells, hostas may develop brown leaf tips, but this does no harm.

-- Hosta leaves will be killed back by frost at the end of the growing season. Many hosta growers allow the leaves to remain through the winter -- some never remove the leaves, which form a natural mulch for the plants. In the spring, new leaves emerge from the crown of the plant. Every year, you'll have more leaves than the year before.

-- Hosta flowers rise from the base of the plants on tall stalks. The blooms are usually white, light pink or pale purple, and they attract hummingbirds. After the flowers fade, many hostas develop attractive seed pods.

-- Every year, the American Hosta Society publishes a list of the most popular hostas. The top five hostas in the AHS 2018 poll are: June, Sagae, Liberty, Victory and Blue Angel. The top five miniature hostas are: Blue Mouse Ears, Pandora's Box, Frosted Mouse Ears, Cameo and Cracker Crumbs.

SOURCES

-- American Hosta Society, americanhostasociety.org, lists many mail-order hosta specialists on its website, along with information about growing hostas, hosta display gardens and hosta clubs.

Put flowerpots to work in your garden this summer. Pretty pots, bursting with flowers and foliage, are a great way to put the spotlight on favorite plants and flash some of your style.

No garden is too large or too small for a few well-placed flowerpots. A handsome container perched on a pedestal right in a flower bed or a cluster of pots by the garden gate capture your attention and draw your eye into the garden. Pots full of fresh herbs near the kitchen door are handy for snipping, and their fragrance will follow you into the house. Flowerpots can be placed strategically to direct traffic in the garden, to screen views or to fill in bare spots. They demand a little more attention than plants in flower beds, but they reward the extra work.

Pots are "a way to pull people in -- if you're looking to highlight a delicate, interesting or fragrant plant, try it in a pot," says Erin Presley, a horticulturist at Olbrich Botanical Gardens in Madison, Wisconsin. Olbrich is a 16-acre botanical treasure in the heart of Madison, bursting with inspiration. Every year, the gardeners plant about 500 containers, displaying them all around among the lush and exuberant display gardens. Each horticulturist is encouraged to design containers with new plants and interesting combinations, and they all develop and contribute their own individual motifs and styles to the garden.

Thoughtful design and great plants turn ordinary flowerpots into exceptional accents in a garden, Presley says. In the winter, she and the other horticulturists pore over plant catalogs, make digital inspiration boards with possible combinations, and collaborate to refine their ideas. Coming up with a theme -- which may simply be a color choice or combination -- helps focus your intentions, she says. Presley is in her second year of exploring the color red in her flowerpots.

"People are hesitant to use red," she says. "Mixing different reds can be difficult." She's experimenting with a red-and-purple color scheme, adding silver and tan accents with ornamental grasses and other plants with textural foliage. Her pots in the courtyard of Olbrich's herb garden will feature a dozen plants, including red-flowering dahlias, red-leaf ornamental cotton, silver sage, and red gladiolus. She's using a wispy, bronze-leaf carex to "knit the look together and give your eye a rest," she says.

Putting together combinations for pots is fun, and that's the whole idea behind Olbrich's Pro Potting Bench, staffed by garden horticulturists, at the garden's annual spring plant sale. Visitors shopping for plants can ask the pros for advice on combinations, refine their ideas and take home a lot of confidence, along with their plant purchases. Even experts need encouragement, Presley says, which is why the staff members bounce ideas off each other in the winter, as they are developing their designs for pots.

"If something doesn't work the first time, revamp your idea instead of trying something completely different," Presley suggests. Even after putting a lot of work into a combination, it may still need just a few refinements. She is taking her own advice in a design for plants near Olbrich's entrance, making use of her traffic-stopping red palette but adding even more texture and bright splashes of contrasting colors.

"We always try to expand on things we have done in the past and get new ideas going," Presley says.

She recommends using glazed pots in shade gardens, where a shiny color adds sparkle in the dappled light. In clusters of pots, she suggests one bold, attention-grabbing combination in a dominant container, and smaller pots full of plants with interesting flowers, foliage and textures worthy of closer inspection.

When you're planning your pots for this summer, "think about where they will go, what their role is in the garden," Presley says. "Will you see the pot from one side, or from all sides? Will it be in sun or shade?"

You can start to plan your combinations for each container simply by picking out two flowering plants that complement each other and then looking for foliage plants to fill in. Annual and perennial grasses, coleus, alternanthera, iresine, haloragis and other foliage plants add volume to pots and look good all summer long.

Presley also loves using herbs in pots, including various basil plants.

"It's a great plant, and it constantly needs to be harvested so it encourages you to groom your pots," she says. "You're putting more effort into your containers, so you might as well get a benefit -- something extra -- like an edible plant or a wonderful fragrance."

Don't be afraid to grow perennial plants in pots, or even to use small shrubs or trees to give height and structure to your designs. You can use flowerpots almost like a nursery for perennials and small trees, growing them for a season in containers displayed around the garden: Each plant can be placed to the greatest ornamental effect and in the most favorable growing conditions.

"Things that are too vulnerable to go into a flower bed right away -- try them in a pot for the summer, before you put them out into the hurly-burly of the garden," Presley says.

The professional horticulturists at Olbrich and other botanical gardens have the time and resources that home gardeners may envy, but when it comes to flowerpots, we can all have plenty of fun. Take inspiration from the pros and start experimenting with plants in pots this summer. Give your good ideas a chance to grow.

SOURCE

-- Olbrich Botanical Gardens, olbrich.org

SIDEBAR

Plotting Out Your Pots

Here are some ideas and recommendations from Erin Presley and the staff at Olbrich Gardens to help you plan your flowerpots and keep them looking great from spring through fall:

-- Plan ahead: Flip through catalogs and magazines, and prowl the internet for inspiration, and make a design board with clippings or drag and drop your own photographs or internet images onto a document to experiment with combinations.

-- Develop a unifying theme.

-- Include perennials in striking combination with annual flowers and foliage plants.

-- Plant in a lightweight, moisture-retentive, soil-less potting mix. Add coir (coconut fiber) to help retain moisture. At planting time, supplement the potting mix with slow-release fertilizer.

-- Fertilize once a month with water-soluble fertilizer. Follow directions on the label: Don't over-fertilize.

-- Groom your plants in pots. Keep vines from growing out of control. Prune to encourage branching and flowering. Remove spent flowers.

-- Structural elements -- an obelisk, an artful arrangement of twigs or unexpected additions such as palm fronds give pots a lot of pop.

-- Be realistic: Plants in pots will need more attention than plants in the ground. Large pots may only need to be watered two or three times a week. Smaller pots may need water every day. If you're not going to be able to water regularly, use large pots and drought-tolerant plants.

-- The most interesting combinations have it all: color, texture, fragrance, flowers and foliage.

-- If a plant dies or does not perform, replace it.

In the never-ending horticultural competition for best flowering shrub, hydrangeas consistently take the top prize. No other family of flowering shrubs can compete with hydrangeas for their beauty and versatility. Gardeners are the big winners: For every garden, there is a hydrangea -- or three.

Hydrangeas are natural problem-solvers. They make a great impression when they're planted in billowing waves across the front of a house. They're magnificent specimens on their own. They fill a small garden with luxurious, long-lasting blooms, and they are grand enough to more than hold their own in a big garden. They're also extremely handsome in pots. And, if you can bear to pick them, their flowers are gorgeous in bouquets.

The challenge is deciding which ones to grow. In the past couple of decades, dozens of ever more colorful, hardy, hardworking new hydrangeas have been introduced. These new varieties tolerate steamy summers and cold winters, bloom for months and need no pampering.

Hydrangeas are almost the essence of summer. The original Endless Summer hydrangea -- a blue mop-head flowering variety known for its long blooming period, from early summer through fall -- was introduced in 2004 and was an immediate sensation: 18 million plants were sold in its first seven years on the market. Since then, three more hydrangeas have been added to the Endless Summer collection: Blushing Bride, a white-flowering variety; Twist-n-Shout, a variety with delicate lace-cap flowers; and BloomStruck, which has deep blue blooms. This year, they are joined by Summer Crush, which has luminous raspberry-colored flowers on a compact plant.

Endless Summer hydrangeas are bred to last. They flower both on new shoots and on the previous year's growth, so their first flowers open earlier and their last ones bloom later than most hydrangeas on the market. Their hardiness also sets them apart from any previous summer-flowering hydrangeas, but in the coldest climates, planting them in protected spots is still a good idea.

As gardeners have rediscovered the pleasures of mop-head hydrangeas, hybridizers have broadened the selection of panicle-blooming hydrangeas, too. Panicle hydrangeas tend to bloom a little later in the summer, their cone-shaped flower heads covered with hundreds of tiny white or cream-colored blooms that fade to pink. They adapt gracefully to sun or part shade, and they are both heat-tolerant and bone hardy, surviving without protection even in bitterly cold climates. Limelight, perhaps the best known of the new generation of panicle hydrangeas, grows up to 8 feet tall and blooms prolifically. A dwarf form, Little Lime, has all the hardworking characteristics of the big shrub, but only grows to be 3 to 5 feet tall. Bobo, even smaller and perhaps more floriferous, is only 3 feet tall and wide.

"They're eye-catching," says Noelle Clark Akin of Petitti Garden Centers in northeast Ohio. The company has nine shops, and hydrangeas are the top-selling flowering shrub at all of them. Petitti Garden Centers carry 40 or more different hydrangeas, and last year, Bobo and Little Lime outsold even Endless Summer, Akin says, although not by much.

The selection doesn't stop there. Breeders have been working to improve the flowers and performance of smooth hydrangeas, which are North American natives. (They are also called Hydrangea arborescens.) New varieties have bigger flowers and sturdier stems than the original species, and a refreshing splash of color: Several new smooth hydrangeas -- Invincibelle Spirit and Invincibelle Mini Mauvette among them -- have big pink snowball flowers rather than white blooms. Arborescens hydrangeas are heat- and cold-tolerant, blooming in full sun or part shade.

When customers come to a garden shop looking for hydrangeas, they usually go out with "whatever looks best the day they come in," says Ron Meadows, the buyer for the nearly two dozen Meadows Farms Garden Centers in Virginia and Maryland. Limelight and Little Lime are among the most popular with Meadows Farms retail customers.

Garden designers go beyond the crowd favorites, Meadows says, and often include oakleaf hydrangeas in clients' gardens. These hydrangeas have large, leathery leaves, rather like big red oak leaves. The plants bloom in early summer, with loose, white panicle-type flowers. In fall, the foliage turns deep red. When the leaves drop, the plants' stems, with naturally peeling bark, are particularly decorative through the winter.

"Oakleaf hydrangeas don't show very well in the garden center, but I love them in the landscape," Meadows says. They can grow to 8 feet tall or more, but dwarf varieties are perfect for small gardens: Munchkin and Ruby Slippers both grow to only 3 feet tall.

Choosing among the types, colors and sizes of hydrangeas at a garden shop in spring can be overwhelming, Meadows admits. "We need to streamline," he says. But until that happens, if you come home with more than one hydrangea, you have an excuse: You've just started a collection.

SOURCES

-- Endless Summer hydrangeas have their own website, endlesssummerblooms.com