Hoya mariae as Mellow Yellow

A fellow attendee in last year's lecture on hoyas at the local garden show brought a long vine of Hoya mariae. She is an FB friend and a plant hobbyist too, so encouraged me to plant what she brought. However, she said it has the habit of invasiveness, so i turned down the offer. Besides, i thought it was so full of leaves and maybe lazy to bloom. It also didn't have any flower in the vine that time. 

Sometime last November a hoya hobbyist from Thailand visited and we went to an area near the mountain where lots of plants are being sold at the roadsides. It was raining so hard and we just bought some hoya vines that took our fancy. Most of the time the vines didn't have flowers, we just relied on the description of the seller, who also do not know the name or the species they are selling. 

I bought a few vines, whatever they might turn out to be later. Then this one led the rest of the group in blooming. It doesn't have shoots yet but started blooming. I love that shape of the flowers, characteristics and color. The pure yellow color is different and beautiful. When i asked for the identification from a friend, it turned out to be Hoya mariae synonymous with Clemensiella mariae. I was laughing because i rejected a free cutting, but eventually bought it. LOL.

 Mellow Yellow Monday
Macro Monday 2
Nature Notes
Floral Friday Fotos

A lovely invasive!

Here is a flower and flowers of Dianella tasmanica, an introduced species here in the country as ornamental plant. My mother found it somewhere and somehow the plants are lovely the first few months. I also love the very dainty, cute flowers with slight bluish hue on the top petal. I love doing close-up and macro shots of the flowers. The leaves have variegated longitudinal white margins adding leaf attraction. 

However, it gets so invasive that a big portion of our garden becomes already its own territory. They produce lots of stolons that grow long and productive. That is the problem for introduced species, the natural predators should have been included if they will be introduced. (This is just a joke, as we all know of the food chain, so predation doesn't just stop there). Suffice it to say, that most introduced species get invasive in the new place. What we did was to pull most of the plants and put them in the compost pile. 

Mellow Yellow Monday

Macro Monday 2

Floral Friday Fotos
Our World Tuesday

Art in a Hibiscus

Gumamela, that is our local term for  Hibiscus rosa-sinensis! This is a plant that has been with all of us since we were born, and our grandparents were born. It can be called a heirloom plant. It can be found everywhere, at different colors, different leaves and different varieties. Some are planted as hedges at the margins of the property, some allowed to grow tall as tall shrubs, some fully manicured topiaries, and some in very beautifully pedestal pots. But many of these local varieties are just taken for granted, left growing at the sides, eaten by stray animals especially goat kids, and didn't receive any care from human beings. But they still strive to live, come rainy season nor long dry season! And that is how tolerant and resistant the gumamela plant is to us.

We have a plant relegated to the sides just like what i mentioned. But i know it has to be loved, cared for and given attention. The following shows some of the characteristics of even just a gumamela flower. And i am sure, there still are many angles i haven't shown. And the whole plant is much more useful than what we see! But please excuse me if this plant might be a hybrid, as i didn't know. It has been there for quite a while, as if it is a native!

Macro Monday 2
Monday Mellow Yellow
Through My Lens
Floral Friday Fotos

In Focus: Hoya alwitriana

Hoya alwitriana is one of the newly documented hoyas endemic in the Philippines with the complete name and authors as Hoya alwitriana Kloppenb., Siar, Guevarra & Carandang 2012.  It is an accepted species listed at The International Plant Names Index.

I have acquired it a few years ago, but unlike my other hoyas it gave me a slumped growth, unwilling to respond to my normal care and yet did not die. After two years, it finally produced the long stem where the peduncles emerge. It was not just a peduncle as i expect from a newly flowering hoya plant, it gave 3 consecutive peduncles. Aside from that stem, there is a peduncle emerging from the base, just immediately almost at the soil level. It was fantastic, and those peduncles didn't stop producing flowers. The old flowers drop, and the next buds come soonest. I am so stunned.

 The Buds

Here is the umbel arising from the base of the plant, just above the media surface.

Unopened buds have conspicuous brown dots or a semblance to sprinkling of dust particles. 

The pedicels are conspicuously lovely in dark pink to maroon. 

Newly Opened Flowers

opening flowers

 newly opened flowers

5 hrs after opening showing the slightly reflexed corollas

Honeybee Magnet

 Immediately after the flowers open in the morning, at about 8 a.m., a lot of honeybees converge on the flowers. These are our native Apis cerana. All the umbels have their share of the honeybees.  There are other open hoya flower species nearby, vitellina, pubicorolla, multiflora, pubicalyx, etc., but they only swarm on the H. alwitriana flowers. This phenomenon amazed me, but after about 10 or 15 minutes they all left. The buzzing sounds were suddenly gone. I can only surmise that the first nectar during opening is the most delicious or important nectar for this bees, or maybe the nectar is available only during those precious minutes!

 Not even one bee went to any of the already opened flowers. I watched the Hoya vitellina while opening, yet the bees seem to dislike it.

The plant

Its leaves are unusually bigger than the umbels, and can be described as oval in shape. There is a little curling down of the leaf margins. (Leaf characteristics can be technically read from the taxonomic publication)

Nature Notes

Monday Mellow Yellows

Through My Lens

Our World Tuesday

Floral Friday Fotos

The Yellows

Last week i've posted our flowers with orange colors. Today i am posting the yellows to follow the color that Floral Friday Fotos posted.  We also have lots of yellow flowers, but these ones are easier to locate in my files, of course they are all hoya. I know you will not be surprised because i have been telling everyone of my hoya addiction. And this addiction flows to the blogs and to Facebook too. Sometimes i also put individual features of hoya in In Focus.

I didn't expect that i already have a few yellow hoyas in my collection, i never counted them until i realized when i posted here. Yellows are lovely, and they are not as loud as the orange and the reds.

In case you will be bored with my hoya photos, i hope you wont, i included two yellow photos at the last. They are common plants too, ampalaya or bitter gourd, which is a vegetable and a chrysanthemum. I hope you enjoy these.

 Hoya alwitriana

 Hoya halconensis

 Hoya merrillii

 Hoya crassicaulis

 Hoya buotii

 Hoya crassicaulis

ampalaya

Chrysanthemum with a green visitor

Floral Friday Fotos

Monday Mellow Yellows

Through My Lens

Macro Monday 2

Macro Finds

I am glad to have the Olympus OMD-EM10 with macro function. Every time i go to the garden i see different things that normally elude the naked eye because they are so small. Sometimes you have to purposely look for these very small things, so they will be obvious, otherwise they really camouflage very well.

There is a lot of macro subjects in the garden, but lack of time is normally my dilemma. When i am about to leave, i wonder why more of them suddenly surface, as if they want to have their photos too.

The above yellow spider's body is only around 3mm, but the feet are so long that a predator will be caught before it reaches the main body. Here, it is guarding its egg mass with its life. A few spider web fibers enclose them, but it is not very thick to ward off predators. 

For Mellow Yellows

 That bee is too early,  already trying to get nectar or maybe pollen from a marigold which is not fully open yet. I wonder if it can already get what it wants. 

Anthers of a hippeastrum flower at an early stage, when pollens are not yet mature or ready for pollination

This gumamela or hibiscus in the morning when it is still full of dew. In a little while the dew will evaporate with the rising sun, and the flower will be fully open.

Mellow Yellow Monday

Macro Monday 2

Through My Lens

Nature Notes

Our World Tuesday 

Drops and Yellows

I've been so engrossed with water droplets lately. The colder temperatures in the mornings allow this at home in the province, as they don't evaporate as quickly as in normal days. By colder, i just mean about 23-25C, and to us in the hot tropics that is cold enough. My friends in the temperate countries who have minus zero winters will laugh at me, but that is just our reality. How i really wish you can send us some cold winds when we are in the height of the dry season, with our temps at 35 to 38C! Can you relate with that? Probably you wont, and good you don't experience that.

yellow Ixora

yellow Hoya halconensis at opening

tomato flowers

a portal to the 4th dimension 

 another universe

 The path through the 4th D portal, can you see the person going in those steps?

Mellow Yellow Monday

Macro Monday 2

Our World Tuesday

Hoya merrillii and Visitor

Hoya merrillii is a prolific hoya. Once it started blooming the umbels will produce buds as soon as they are spent. Sometimes, there are even already young buds while other buds are still blooming. However, they don't form very nicely rounded umbels like the other hoyas in my collection. In fact, the first time they flowered they look so disorganized. But they produce a lot of umbels to compensate for the unharmonious patterns of the pedicels. 

 Here is a more arranged flowers in one umbel to give you an example of my description on top.

Here are two umbels arising from the same node. They are prolific aren't they? But look at the lenght and directions of the pedicels, unrully i tell you! They also have a mild scent that maybe very attractive to the moths and insects, but for me is not top of the line. That is because i have other hoyas with sweet scents that can be made into perfumes, if the nectars are just very plenty.

 I visited them one night and look who is its nocturnal visitor, a very lovely tiger moth. It actually stayed there for a long time only changing position to seep nectar.

 I am trying to make a close-up shot to see the proboscis in action. The moth is just about 2cm in length from the head to the tip of the wings.

Here is a cropped part to show you a more vivid detail where the end of its proboscis is directed into, for sucking nectar. It was pointed to the base of the corona, in between the corona and corolla. Hmmm, they are really built for that purpose. Imagine me also trying to sip the nectar! In my case i put my finger to dab on the nectar and taste it. I have tasted many species already. Hoya nectar tastes good, although i cannot just say the differences among the species.

Nature Notes

Outdoor Wednesday

Floral Friday Foto

Todays Flowers

Mellow Yellow Monday

Bright Throat!

Guess time: do you know what is this?

  

Macro Monday Too

Mellow Yellow

NF Inspiring Photography-Catching Light