Back Matter

References & Further Reading

This guide synthesizes information from horticultural societies, university extension publications, and standard reference texts. If you want to go deeper on any one topic, start with these.

Authoritative organizations

• American Hosta Society — americanhostasociety.org. The registry of named cultivars, the "Hosta of the Year" award, cultural guides, and an annual journal.
• American Hosta Growers Association — trade group of nurseries; their annual "Hosta of the Year" selection is the most reliable signal of a beginner-friendly, widely-available plant.
• British Hosta and Hemerocallis Society — UK-side perspective; useful for cool, damp-climate cultivar recommendations.

University extension publications

Free, written by horticultural specialists, regionally specific. The single most underused gardening resource in America.

• Ohio State University Extension — ohioline.osu.edu. Fact sheets on shade gardening, hosta culture, slug control, soil testing. Soil tests run through the Soil Fertility Lab in Wooster.
• Cornell University Cooperative Extension — Northeast US perspective; excellent fact sheets on hosta diseases including HVX.
• Missouri Botanical Garden Plant Finder — missouribotanicalgarden.org/PlantFinder. Searchable database of every commonly-grown hosta with culture notes.
• University of Minnesota Extension — strong on cold-climate overwintering practices applicable to northern Ohio.

Books

• The New Encyclopedia of Hostas, Diana Grenfell & Michael Shadrack (Timber Press, 2009). The standard reference; descriptions of over 700 cultivars with photos.
• The Hostapedia, Mark Zilis (2009). An encyclopedic 1,200+ page reference; collector-oriented, exhaustive.
• The Book of Little Hostas, Kathy & Michael Shadrack (Timber Press, 2010). The definitive guide to miniature and small hostas.
• Shady Characters, W. George Schmid (Timber Press, 2009). Companion plants for hosta beds — ferns, heucheras, brunnera, and friends.

Disease and pest references

• HostaVirus.com and the American Hosta Society's HVX information page — the definitive resources on Hosta Virus X identification and prevention.
• USDA APHIS plant pest alerts — for jumping worms, an emerging soil-disturbance pest in Ohio that affects hosta beds via root damage and soil structure loss.

Climate and zone data

• USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map — planthardiness.ars.usda.gov. The 2023 update map. Ohio runs from zone 5b in the far northeast (Geauga County) to zone 6b in the southern Ohio River counties.
• NOAA Climate Normals for Ohio — frost-date data by county. Useful for fine-tuning the planting calendar.

Image sources

All photographs embedded in this guide are hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons and are individually credited in their figure captions. Each is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC BY-SA 2.0, 3.0, or 4.0). Diagrams are original to this guide.

If a photograph ever fails to load, search the photographer's name and the cultivar name at commons.wikimedia.org to find the current file URL.

A note on cultivar recommendations

The cultivars recommended in Chapter 12 were chosen for three things: (1) availability at independent garden centers in the Midwest, (2) track record in zone 5–6 conditions over multiple years of cultivation, and (3) visual variety across leaf size, color, and texture so that a small selection covers a wide aesthetic range. They are not the rarest or the newest; they are the ones most likely to thrive in a beginner's first shade bed.