Infected Cultivars in the Marketplace

    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. Because of this, they may be found infected in several nurseries at the retail level. 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. HVX can take years to produce symptoms. 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. They are only cheap common cultivars infected with a disease that can spread.

    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 mislabeled, so some of the varieties below can be found with different labels.

Return to HostaLibrary HVX page