It is beautiful. When they bloom, it's fabulous. Frilly light blossoms wave above the plants in four separate phases over the whole summer. I have dark green areas, variegated white areas, yellow areas, and green areas. I love and baby my hostas.
I've had crown rot attack one section of my hosta garden. These were my beloved small white hostas (well, mostly white). A bunch of them died in a two-three week period. It started with the leaves wilting for no reason, then falling free of the crown, again for no apparent reason. What I hadn't checked was what was happening down at the ground level. When I felt around down there, I felt goo in the crowns and smelled a horrid rotting smell. The leaves fell off because of that. This happened in the middle of the summer.
After reading up on the symptoms, I learned it was crown rot. I took them out of the ground, removed the dirt and threw it away (infected and impossible to fix) and drenched the whole area with some expensive chemical that promised to kill the crown rot virus-bacteria-fungus-whatever it was. Then I cleaned up the sick plants by removing all the dirt (over a very big bucket that I cleaned up the same way later). I pinched and washed away everything that smelled rotten or felt gooey. Then I soaked what was left of the poor plants in that same chemical. After all this toxin-removing activity, I replanted them in pots with new soil and quarantined them for the rest of the summer and over the winter. Half died. The rest were clean and healthy the next summer. I didn't put them in the ground again until the following fall, more than a year from when it all started, when I was sure they were truly well.
THAT's what I'm worried about.
