Member Profiles

Marianne Ferraina

My name is Marianne Ferraina, that's Marianne with an "i" not "y". I live in Washington Township, New Jersey. I've been married for 30 years, have two children, and two granddaughters, Veronica and Victoria.  I enjoy dancing, movies, good food, my husband, and, of course, my granddaughters but one of my true loves is Hosta Gardening.

I have been collecting hostas now for about 10 years and completely enjoy it. As I have a full-time job, I can only work on my hostas a couple of hours at night and on the weekends. When I do get the time, I spend as much time as possible.

Very good friends of ours, Gene and Chris Dambro, first got us interested in hosta gardening. They had many hostas in their garden and I would always admire them. They invited us to one of the hosta meetings and the rest is history. We enjoyed the people and the hostas so much that we joined the Delaware Valley Hosta Society and started to collect them and we restructured our yard so we would have room to plant hostas.

We moved from our old home with a small yard to our present house four summers ago and have finally started to see some progress in our garden. It has taken a long time to clean up the back since the last owners let everything over grow. We have added 10 new gardens a pond and are still working on more. They are not very big since we don't have a very large area in the back. There is about 50 yards of woods behind our lot which belongs to the church and we would like to lease it or, better yet, buy it , but that may be sometime down the road. We have recently added some walkways and among the walkways we have added hosta gardens with different themes. One area is all western, another is frogs and still another is toys. Each year in the spring we work on another area of the back yard to add a few more gardens and hostas. I have around 85 different varieties of hostas. My goal, of course, is to keep adding them and have many many more. 

To use this picture viewer, click on one of the four thumbnails and a larger picture of that thumbnail will appear below the thumbnails.

I'm lucky since my husband also enjoys helping me with my hobby and does a lot of the heavy work. I'm including a couple of my hosta pictures for you to look at and I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

One day I hope to host a hosta meeting and auction, but until then, happy gardening.