Succulent Ramblings

I like to ramble on about my plants... and other things! My hope is to log the progress of plants and talk about my frustrations with others. So, tune in, turn on, or drop out (if you find it boring!)

Friday, October 16, 2009

Hoya inconspicua finally bloomed. Small flowers remind me of tsangii (only bigger) or maybe wayetti. A pretty little flower. I had two flowers on it, but it's developed a lot more peduncles. Don't know if it will bloom any more until spring, but it should be ready to bloom up a storm by next year. Horror of horrors, though, when I was examing it closely after it was done blooming, I found it infested with scale. I had to really go to town on it, picking off all the little buggers, then watered it with BATS. It's such a beautiful little plant, I couldn't bare to think of tossing it. Here's a photo of the plant...









(That's a pot made by BJ, by the way...) I got it as a cutting from Ted Green last year and at the same time got davidcummingii. Well, either the tags got mixed up when they were packing them, or I somehow mixed them up after I got them because until davidcummingii bloomed this spring and someone on GW corrected the ID, I had no idea. They are similar, mind you - both small-leaved, shape not terribly different. Here's the plant and flowers...















I find the flowers really attractive - the yellow on mauve is very appealing. And they were somewhat fragrant, though (as usual) I couldn't give a "smells like" reference.

Shortly after that, meliflua started to bud up. Now that's one that had interesting buds.

Aren't they interesting? When I took this photo, I also took a photo of the reverse side of the budding peduncle, and I was mortified to find it covered with aphids!! Mind you, I didn't see them until I uploaded the photo onto the computer! The hell of having old eyes! I had to repeatedly spray the bugs off. The effective thing to do is spray them with alcohol, but alcohol will cause the buds to blast and since this was my first bloom, I wasn't about to do that. So I sprayed them with water, blasting them off the buds. Once the flowers opened and I enjoyed them for several days, the aphids came back, so then I blasted them with some alcohol. The flowers didn't seem to be affected too much by the alcohol once they were open. So here's the open bloom:


And one last thing I want to post about today - I have my largest H. macrophylla growing in my sunroom, on a chest in front of the south windows. Here recently, I was looking over a burst of new growth on the plant that was climbing up the window. To my surprise, there was a GIGANTIC leaf - about 7.5" long and nearly 6" wide! My eyes about popped out of my head! Check it out:














It's a great day "in the garden"!



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