Tropicals & Tender Perennials: May Flowers, 1 by plantladylin

plantladylin wrote:
My shepherdii is blooming for the first time, Awesome fragrance! My sister and her husband drove up from South Florida to spend a few days with us. The first time they've been here in probably 20 years! They do not like to travel. My sister has a couple of house plants but isn't really into gardening or house plants to the extent that I am. She was walking around asking me about a bunch of different plants. She didn't know what a Hoya was, said she had never heard of them, but when I said some folks know them as "Wax Plants" she said Aha, I have heard of that but just never knew what they looked like and that there were so many!

We had friends over and cooked steaks on the grill yesterday afternoon. Then in the evening, we were all sitting on the deck by the pool and everyone was asking what the great fragrance was they were smelling ... not the steaks that had been cooked on the grill but the flowers they were smelling. Someone asked if it was Honeysuckle and someone else said maybe jasmine? I told them it was a couple of different Hoya's so we walked around so they could smell each different flower. Hoya's lacunosa, wayettii, ds-70, brevialata, and the shepherdii as well as Gardenia fragrance was filling the air from my two large bushes in the yard. My sister Loved the H. lacunosa fragrance so I gave her a big basket that was blooming, along with a small compacta, a good sized hanging basket of blooming H. wayettii, another large basket of australis and a bag full of gardenia blooms! She was a happy person when they drove off! My brother in law just laughed and said, we came here with only 3 bags and we are going home with 10!

Unfortunately we have had non stop rain for the past 7 or 8 days here ... major flooding in some parts of the city to the tune of $52 million dollars in damage! Luckily our house is on a high lot and we aren't in a flood zone so didn't have any problems. Our swimming pool was overflowing for two or three days. Last estimate I heard we had 23" of rain! I had brought all the hoyas and a few other things up under the covered deck earlier in the week because I didn't want them to rot. I have a lot of other pretty soggy plants but finally, finally I see the sun! Now, maybe things can dry out! Here we were in a bad drought situation for so many months, with fire watches daily and praying for rain ... well, we sure got it! Our Tropical Storm & Hurricane season begins June 1st so I hope we dry out before any more storms hit. We usually don't get hurricanes until late in the season during August & September so hopefully we will be okay for awhile!