I have a home in Eastern Long Island. This May I noticed most of the strawberries in my 1500 sq foot strawberry patch died and then there were large patches in my beds of lilies and day lilies that were bare except for hosta plants that had grown up in those places. At first I thought the voles had eaten the roots but I started digging and the soil was thick with matted roots which were connected to the hosta plants. It appeared as if the 'hosta' plants put out runners that were rapidly propagating hundreds of hosta plants that got really big really fast taking over the garden. The runners turned into huge roots (see photo). They would then send up runners where other plants were growing. They seemed to prefer irises, day lilies, strawberries, even ferns, anything with tuberous roots under the soil. The runners would then choke off and kill these plants. Thus the bald spots in my normally lush, verdant garden resulted from these 'hosta' roots killing them off. I tried pulling out the 'hostas' and they just snapped off like tinkertoys but leaving the masses of roots underneath (see photo). The hosta leaves had grown so quickly they had holes in them like something that has been cloned too many times. And the flowers also came early and seemed oddly mildly distorted. I checked the rest of my garden and found these roots in many places. As I tried to save some of the plants by teasing them out of the choking roots and runners, I found that I was often led to a small wood chip--as if the wood chip were the source of this mutant cloning/hosta/root problem. I remembered that we got mulch 2 years ago from the dump where they reprocess people's branches and leaves. I am thinking now that perhaps the woodchips were contaminated with something that turned the hostas into killer hostas but not true hostas anymore.. I know this sounds crazy but check out the photos. Any ideas anyone?
The only other reference I have found anywhere is someone in the disease forum who had a 'root' problem but no hostas involved.
So far all I have done is try to rescue the plants that are being strangled and to try to dig up as many roots as I can but there are so many and so thick that I think they will just come back. I thought about using Round-up and then putting down landscaping cloth but I have about an acre of land and the roots go down about
6 to 12 inches into the soil. I imagine this couldn't have happened overnight but now it's going very fast.
