July blooms!

Doe41, You have D-Mail.

Wow, that is amazing Carol. A beautiful plant. I love that it has different blooms, really pretty!

Very nice!!

H. pusilla bloomed for me for the first time last week. Others blooming right now are multiflora and yellow heuscheliana. I also have first buds on a lacunosa that I got last summer. The rest are still sulking because we moved in May. Fraterna was budding when we moved, and it blasted, and its budded up twice since, but blasted both times. Funny how some of them can be so darn impervious to change and the others make you pay for daring to so drastically disturb them.....

Christine

H. shepherdii

A little experimenting on H. multiflora with starburst filter on my camera.

Great photography! Wow! H. shepherdii is a pretty photo, but Wow! Wow! that H. multiflora is really amazing! I would love to have an entire wall of some of these photo's.

WOW!!!

Very nice PanamonCreel.....your photos are amazing!
Ric

Great picture of your multifolra, PanamonCreel. I like the starburst effect.

Thanks, it took many tries to get to get this one out (about 60 pictures)

Here's my H obscura. It's blooming its head off this month !
Wonderful scent....

Wonderful!!

Same here with my obscura.

Paula - I absolutely LOVE how the color changes from pinkish to orange-ish (left to right). And I've never seen an obscura umbel that was so big!! Nice!

Gabi

wow Paula that umbel is huge.

Can't compete with my single compacta bloom but it's a lucky one :)

Paula, that really is amazing. What are you feeding that thing?

Glad you like it ! This was her first bloom ever....

I started using MSU fertilizer a few months ago, although I've only given
about 2 doses, I think. She's just seemed to really take off with it.
There are 3 peduncles in bud and one of them just finished blooming
earlier this month !

Paula

Woo Hoo!!! I can FINALLY post some blooms. The most prolific bloomer is H. carnosa 'Krimson Princess', here with a very hungry friend...

H. compacta, solid green form

H. compacta, variegated form

H. pubicalyx 'Pink Silver' showing leaf, bud and blooms

H. obovata

And finally, the very first blooms I've had on H. pubicalyx 'RHP'. This plant is in a 12" pot growing up a pair of tomato cages. At present there are 9 more maturing umbels!
Enjoy!
Barb

They are all soooo beautiful! Can't wait for mine to take off! When they do, I;ll post pix!

Oooh, I see I've missed some beautiful blooms the past few days! Wow, H. obscura is really lovely! Another fragrant one? My list is getting longer and longer.

bjf: Great bloomers you have too! Isn't it wonderful having so many all blooming at once!

I have a Krinkle 8 blooming again and the same old ds-70 and speckled leaf lacunosa. My kentiana blasted it's first bloom a few weeks ago so I didn't get to see it open, but it's getting ready to bloom again! I also found a bud on H. brevialata which hasn't bloomed much in the past year. We just had our pool and deck area redone and all the plants had been moved from one place to another so I think they got a bit perturbed with being shuffled around. And, my husband just pruned, or I should say butchered the huge Sheffelera tree just outside the screened pool enclosure so some of my hoyas got sunburned! That tree was the only shade they got from the harsh afternoon sun.

Doe41, Glad your package arrived ok. I hope everything perks up after their travels in this heat. The only hoya's I had to share were common ones but I hope you enjoy them and that they do well for you!

Here is a krimson princess

Another K.P. getting ready to open

I don't mind if they're common! So am I! I'll enjoy them very much.

LOL Audrey! I am always saying my plants are just common ones, because they are normally found in Home Depot or Wal-Mart Garden Centers where I shop a lot. We only have 2 nurseries locally and they mostly carry trees, shrubs and outdoor garden plants, not many house plants at all. I love all kinds of plants and love sharing them so I hope the hoya's do well for you and I hope the Epi cuttings root quickly and grow fast too.

You are very generous Plantladylin. I had the same thought in mind for Doe14 but am fighting mealie bugs on my K 8, so the only one I have big enough to share is my old Hoya carnosa. If you don't have one yet Doe14, I am offering a generous cutting.
I am just a beginner myself so all my others are still small. Here is a photo of the carnosa.

Speaking of Home Depot hoyas, here is one that I bought last spring from there with it's first bloom! It was such a nice surprise as I didn't see it forming, just poof, there it was a couple of days ago!

H Brevialata and it smells like caramel to me, yum!

~Brenda

Very nice carnosa elizzy. I have a couple of noids that I think might be carnosa but not sure. One has buds so I can't wait for it to open so I can see what the bloom looks like!

Brenda ... love the brevialata! Mine has one bud cluster, and I can't wait for those blooms! The brevialata is a slow bloomer for me.

My pool and deck area smells so wonderful in the evening with the fragrant lacunosa and ds-70 blooming, and soon the brevialata and kentiana will add to it. It would be awfully strong to have all of them blooming indoors at once so I just bring one plant inside at a time when I want to perfume the inside of the house!

Lin, hi! Yes, it IS great to have a bunch of them blooming at the same time. I am really enjoying it. I found two budded peduncles on H. sp 1420, too.... can't wait to see what that one looks like.
Had a surprise visitor to the perennial garden bird bath today and got the photo through the window, out past the screened porch, so it's not the best quality. Did manage to get an umbel of H. carnosa rubra in the pic, though. Forgot to include that one in the previous group.

Barb

Cool hawk? falcon?

Not sure of the hawk's identity; am waiting for some input on the Bird ID forum. It was majorly cool, Carol. I just hope the baby bluebirds didn't fledge today and are still safe and sound inside the nest box.
It hopped down to the ground and went on a jaunt through the (very closely planted) perennial garden, then flew up to the corner of the house. I waited a bit and all was quiet, so I tried to sneak out the screened porch door. Got the door about a foot open and he took off like a rocket.... nearly made me drop the camera! Man, what a beauty he was!!

Edit to ID: This is a Cooper's Hawk.... big, gorgeous bird of prey!

This message was edited Jul 29, 2008 4:20 PM

I love it when birds just 'drop' in...especially the big ones!!!! We have a nesting pair of I'o (Hawaiian Hawks) in the forest but we have never seen them so upclose and personal!!!

Great shot of the hawk! We've had lots of Hawks this year, seems like almost every day I hear them screeching and see them flying around. There's a very tall airport windshear detection tower across the street in a little wooded area and they love to perch up there where they have a good view of the surroundings! We have the Cooper's Hawk and Red Tailed Hawks too. We have had an abundance of nesting birds this year with lots of babies so I guess the hawks find good hunting. A couple of months ago a pair of Mocking Birds built a nest in a hibiscus bush in the front yard. A few of the babies went missing quickly and the last one was sitting on a branch one day ... had ventured out of the nest but was not flying yet. We had a pair of Swallowtailed Kites hunting in the neighborhood. I don't know if they got all the babies or not but have a feeling they did. :( One day I spotted them and they were flying really low in the yard so I ran out waving my hands and running around trying to shoo them away! Two UPS trucks had stopped at the corner of our yard (exchanging packages) and they looked at me like I was nuts. I was running around the yard, waving my arms and yelling "No, get out of here!" I didn't bother to tell them I was trying to save a baby bird from predators! LOL. They might have thought I was some crazy lady yelling at them to get out of here! Yesterday I found a baby mocker on the ground under a feeder. Something had pecked the side of it's head but it was still alive! There was a hawk flying about so we aren't sure if it maybe was an immature hawk that attacked and missed or what happened to the mocker. I tried putting it in the now empty nest in the bush but it ended up flying back to the ground. My husband thinks it had a broken wing because it would fly a little ways but fall down. He took it to some underbrush area in the wooded lot across the street. I don't think it was going to survive. If the hawks didn't get it I'm sure the Raccoons or something did during the night.

LOL! Lin, you paint an entertaining word-picture. I can see it now. ;) I've been known to run outside in my jammies waving my arms and yelling "Shoo! Shoo!!" when the grackles or black birds fly in and try their best to empty the feeders.
Sometimes Nature's way is hard for us humans to understand, but it has been that way for eons and will continue (hopefully). We do what we hope is best.
And to keep this thread on track, I'm going to try to get a pic of one of the resident hummingbirds feeding from the Pink Silver flowers tomorrow. He stayed on them for a while tonight but I didn't have my camera outside.

Oh, what a wonderful photo that will be - a hummer actually drinking nectar from your pink silver! I will keep my fingers crossed that you can catch a great shot of that! Can't wait to see if you are able to capture a photo! How exciting that would be. I moved all my hoyas back inside the screened pool enclosure about two weeks ago but think I will hang a few blooming ones back in the trees. We've had a few hummers around this year!

ELizzie, If plantlady didn't send me one, I don't have one! All I have is what she sent to me! I would love to have one!