Every podcast has an origin story. This is ours.
Welcome to the very first episode of Hosta la Vista — the only podcast dedicated entirely to hosta plants, hosta care, and the growers, collectors, and hybridizers who love them. If you're looking for the perfect shade garden plant, a low maintenance perennial that comes back bigger every year, or just the most welcoming corner of the plant collecting community — this is your show.
In this debut episode, sisters Betsy Peterson and Mandy Olson introduce themselves, share how they each fell deep into the world of hostas, and explain why the hosta community deserves its own podcast. Two sisters, two climate zones, two completely different gardens — and one shared obsession with the friendship plant.
Betsy gardens on a city lot in Minnesota zone 4b, proving you don't need acreage to build a serious hosta collection. By day she's a school teacher, but her shade garden is where she truly comes alive. Her favorite hosta variety is Guardian Angel — the blue angel sport that earns its name every single season and turns first-time visitors into instant hosta collectors.
Mandy lives in Kansas zone 7a, tending a sprawling multi-acre shade garden and hosta collection while dabbling in growing hostas from seed and hybridizing her own hosta seedlings. When she's not in the garden she works as a sculptor, and that artist's eye for form, texture, and beauty shapes everything about how she sees hosta foliage — the corrugation, the cupping, the color. Her passion is the fragrant hosta plantaginea family, especially fragrant hostas like Fragrant Bouquet, where a shade perennial dares to smell as good as it looks.
Together they span zone 4 and zone 7, a city lot and several acres, beginner-friendly hosta care and serious hosta hybridizing — but share an equal and slightly unreasonable love for these remarkable shade tolerant plants and the warm, generous community that grows around them. In this first episode they lay out what Hosta la Vista will be: weekly conversations with hosta hybridizers, nursery owners, hosta collectors, show judges, and everyday shade gardeners with extraordinary stories about the best low maintenance perennial in the plant world.
Whether you have two hostas on a shady city lot or two thousand hosta varieties across several acres, whether you're zone 3 or zone 9, whether you're a seasoned collector or just discovering what to plant in the shade — you are in the right garden.
New episodes every Saturday. This is Hosta la Vista — where the shade is cool, the leaves are lush, and the friendships are perennial.
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Tomasz Redman music
