Many
hostas are turning up that are infected with a virus
called Hosta Virus X (HVX) :
The most commonly seen ones are plants of 'Gold Standard',
'Striptease', and 'Sum and Substance', but other common varieties
are being reported infected in large numbers. While this
disease does not kill plants, its primary danger lies in
its proven ability to spread prolifically.
Because symptoms
may take years to show after infection, HVX has infected hundreds of thousands
of plants and is at epidemic levels around the world. If a batch of hostas
contains any individual plants that show HVX symptoms, the whole batch
should be considered infected and should be destroyed, as individual testing
is impractical and not a guarantee.
The following table contains three lists of hosta cultivars
that are infected with HVX in the marketplace. It should be noted that
there is nothing wrong with these cultivars themselves. They are on this
list because some of the plants of these varieties were infected during
propagation. Many of these are among the most commonly available varieties,
and care should be taken when purchasing these varieties to ascertain
that they are free of HVX.
Clean healthy
specimens of these varieties are available from older stocks, but much
of those propagated in the last 6 years or so are suspect. Do not buy
healthy-looking, symptom-free plants from batches where some symptomatic
individuals are present. All in the batch should be considered infected,
and the batch should be destroyed to prevent further spread.
Purchase of the third group is not recommended at all -
these are just heavily symptomatic infected plants, not
new cultivars, which should be destroyed as they are worthless and can
only spread the disease to other healthy plants.
Because this virus is easily spread in gardens and nurseries
and often does not show symptoms for several years, there
is a chance that individual specimens of any hosta from an infected source
may be infected also, but this is different from a variety that was mass-infected
during propagation and widely available.
Cheap plants
in stores that do not specialize in hostas are often mislabelled, so some of the varieties below can be found with different labels.
Click
here for specific plant HVX details:
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