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.

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.