A sport is a shoot of a plant that is different from the original.
A lot of hostas will produce a new sport from time to time, the most obvious ones being those that have a different leaf color. The large-scale application of tissue culture (TC) to propagate hostas has only accelerated this process and we see a lot of sports originating in TC.
Different mechanisms have been proposed to explain the appearance of sports:
As part of our human nature we constantly look for similarities and we classify things. No wonder there is a lot of interest in hosta sports, where parent and sport are at the same time similar and different. By knowing that it is a sport we can learn a lot about a hosta.
The lists on this site are based on my HostaMania database. Information was gathered from various sources, both in printed form and on the Internet. This isn't an exact science, information is often brief, incomplete, contradictory or even false.