One Day at a Time

My hoya plant is blooming again. This plant goes back to my grandparents; my mother started her plant from a cutting, which then I got a cutting of. Hoyas are notoriously (at least in my family) finicky about blooming. They don't like disruption or change very much at all. We got the cutting about 4.5 years ago, shortly after we moved into this house. It bloomed for the first time a few months ago. And it's blooming again! Not only that, but I started a new cutting from this plant that bloomed while it was still in the vase, and it now has buds of its own too.

I find the blooms on these plants to be completely fascinating. They begin as these tiny little nubs that could be anything. As they develop, they move into the "plastic" stage. The flowers themselves appear to be little plastic things that you would find in a silk flower arrangment. When they leave the plastic stage, the flowers move into the "velvet" stage, which is where my current bloom is. The third picture is a little fuzzy, but it's a pretty accurate representation of what the flowers look like. You can see that there appears to be more plastic decoration around the centers, which are frequently glistening crystals. The glisten is the sap, which has the sweetest, most delicate honey flavor.

Really, the whole plant seems artificial in so many ways. The leaves can range from pale to dark green, and they are thick and waxy feeling. Then they sprout these "fake" flowers, which eventually fall off, and the process begins again. And the blooms on my plants are all on bare tendrils of plants, in places where nothing else appears to be going on. (I've posed this bloom with the leaves so it doesn't look so strange.)

Can you tell I love these guys? :-)