This is Hoya cv 'Optimistic', a hoya that I received mislabelled as H. guppyi.  Either way, both are eriostemmas, a type of hoya that grows like the dickens, but rarely flowers in "captivity".  This hoya has bloomed for the past three years; reading up on it I discovered that it blooms only in direct sunlight at the tops of trees in the rain forest. So, I tried putting it in a window that receives maximum sun, and it worked!  Anyway, here is its picture.

And last summer I got the "real" H. guppyi, but it'll be a few years before it flowers ... if I can get it to flower that is!

Dad's Plant Stand Again

My last post was several weeks before we moved last spring. I don't know why I keep forgetting to post to this blog, but I guess that's just one of the benefits of getting older: discovering forgotten things that give us happiness all over again.


The old townhouse sold quickly, we bought about 15 km away, in the area we wanted, and moved at the end of May. Our new house has far more windows than our old house, but there are no sliding glass doors so we can only use the top-most shelves of most of the plant stands. This first one is Dad's plant stand again, and is located in our dining room. I'd estimate there's about 25 hoyas on it, and a few other non-hoya plants. The dining room has another slightly smaller window and there are six plants in it, but they're not hoyas, and thus have no place in this blog.

Hoya fraterna

This plant comes from Borneo and can have up to 50 flowers in an umbel. This picture, taken tonight, is of my plant's first flowering. The flowers which are still opening, are an inch wide. I got it as a cutting in October 2005, and accidentally planted it upside down to root. I'm sure it would have flowered long before now if it hadn't had such a stressed beginning! The leaves are 6" long by 3" wide and are glaborous (not fuzzy like some hoya leaves), nicely veined and quite stiff, but are not succulent. It's a happy day for me when a hoya blooms, but a first blooming is a very special occasion.

Hoya Archboldiana

I got this hoya in the summer of 2006. In the fall, it sprouted its first long vine and at the end of it a peduncle popped out. It then did nothing until the following spring, when it produced about a dozen buds. These are the only three that didn't fall off, but they thrilled me anyway. Each of these flowers is nearly 2" in diameter, and have a very light scent, that reminds me a bit of baby oil. I just love their cup shape. Hoya Archboldiana grows wild in Papua, New Guinea. The leaves average about 7" long and 2" wide and are a very dark green. It has put on a lot of growth this year, and budded up one more time, but the buds blasted unfortunately (fell off before opening). I have great hopes for it next year, in our new house.

New Use for a Mini Greenhouse

This stand used to be a mini greenhouse. At one time I tried to start annuals from seed, so my wonderful mother bought me this for my birthday a few years back. Some of my seedlings did okay but it was just too labour intensive for me, especially when bedding plants are so cheap and so easy to find in my area. So, I took its plastic "cape" off and initially turned it into shelving for my office closet. When the big clean-out started, I realized I had another display souroce for my hoyas. There's at least 35 hoyas on this stand; the bottom three shelves have hoyas on it that are all new this year. The hoyas on the top shelf is the one that gives me the most problems, because they send vines over to visit their neighbours, and I have to unwind them. If you look on top of the speaker sitting to the right, this is a 7 year old plant that is an offspring of my first hoya, which itself was an offspring of a hoya my mother had for 20 years. Its hoya carnosa, and is sometimes known as an heirloom hoya, because, looked after properly, they can live more than 50 years.

The stand sits to the right of a window that faces south-east (in fact its in the room directly below the stand in the post below), and gets very bright light and lots of direct morning sun.

Dad's Plant Stand

My hoya displays are in a state of "work in progress" right now because as I said earlier, we're listing our house for sale in the spring and are doing some redecorating. Hoyas are moved from shelf to shelf, shelves are moved from room to room. I'm getting nicer display shelving for some of them early in the new year. This picture is of the stand in our bedroom, sitting beside a south-east facing sliding glass door and gets really bright light all day, and direct sun for a couple of hours in the morning. The stand was made by my father more than 20 years ago; he's been gone since 1995 andI hope I can hold on to it for a few more years. It has one of my oldest hoyas on it, H.compacta, which is the one on the top shelf with the gnarled looking leaves. That one's flowers are a nice pale pink. Other hoyas in the picture are carnosa, carnosa krimson princess, densifolia, obovata, calycina, pallilimba,verticillata, montana, and a few others I can't remember the names of right now.

Hoya Addiction and the Joys of Selling One's House

A year ago, I had a few less plants in my house - 115 or so, including the hoyas. Then, just after Christmas last year, we decided that we will list our house for sale in February 2008. We watch all the "Buy Me", "Sell Me", etc., type shows, and the main messages you're given is "declutter", "depersonalize" and "people don't want to see your stuff, they want to see the house".

So, I was encouraged to find new homes for various plants. I found new homes for my philodendrons, bromeliads, ferns, monsteras, sanseverias, epis, succulents, cacti, even a few hoyas that I had more than one of - about 45 plans in all. I have some very happy friends, because I couldn't sell them, I considered it to be far more important to find someone who knows how to look after the plants that I nurtured into lush, healthy and beautiful specimens. Some of these plants were more than 10 years old.

I did keep two that will be staying - a Norfolk Island Pine that's about 15 years old and a farily large pony tail palm. I also have two hibiscuses, a duranta and another one I can never rememer the name of that a friend gave to me. I can't part with any of these either, but will try to get them fostered once we list. Other decluttering meant packing up all of our books, keepsakes and collections. Wow, that's been a big job-our garage is nearly filled with boxes!

About the hoyas though - being a confirmed and unrepentant hoya addict, and having nearly a whole year, I managed to acquire another 50 or so hoyas last year (okay, 56). I don't consider my hoyas to be clutter, but just to be cooperative, I have "contained" them onto five stands. I had one plant stand that my father made about 20 years ago, which has always been used for plants. The other four, I got from Ikea, and they all have adjustable shelves, which is helpful because some of the hoyas are on trellises that are more than 3 feet high. But, "condensing/containing" this many plants onto shelves has given me some challenges. One is to be very, very careful that I don't miss any of them when watering. My biggest job these days is keeping the individual plants from having "twining parties". One of the nicest surprises I had was a few weeks ago, I found an umbel of Hoya lobbii flowers two days before the flowers opened! I hadn't even noticed they were there.

We also replaced light fixtures, taps in the kitchen and bathrooms, the dishwasher, repaired everything that needed it, and completely repainted the house.

Now, we can only wait until the sales rep sends a stager to help prepare the house for showing. I'm fully prepared for the stager to tell me how completely wrong I am and that my hoyas will have to go if I expect to show the place to its fullest potential. My message to that stager will be along the lines of "if you can't handle the challenge of showing our home with the few limiations we're posing, then you're in the wrong business".

I'm really curious to find out how this is going to work out.

Hoya Heuscheliana

This hoya comes from the Philippines, each flower is about 1/8" in diameter and are an unremarkable yellow colour. I got this plant as an unrooted cutting from a friend in Oregon in the fall of 2005. The fascinating things about these flowers for me is both that they are so tiny, and that at night they smell like a buttery, butterscotch candy. It also amazes me that the flower never opens more than what you see in the picture. I showed a co-worker the picture and she said that the flowers remind her of a Chinese lantern. For me, the umbels of flowers never have more than six or eight in them. Hopefully when this plant is more mature, it will produce umbels with more flowers. There's another variation of this hoya that has pink flowers, and I think they are even smaller than these. I think I may have to acquire that one too!

Hoya cv Sunrise

I got this hoya as a cutting from a friend in the summer of 2005. H. cv Sunrise is a cross between Hoya lacunosa and Hoya obscura. This is its first flowers, which bloomed in early October this year. The flowers are about 1/4" in diameter and are quite similar to Hoya lacunosa, which has white to yellow flowers. You'll notice pink on only parts of these flowers. This is because that part of the flowers were closest to the window. I have the plant in a very bright window which faces north-west, but gets only a bit of late day sun. If this plant got more sun, I'm sure that the flowers would have more pink in them.