November Blooms

I am maybe biased to flowers that cater to butterflies. That is my disclaimer because most of the plants you will see in this post are nectar plants, loved by butterflies, which in turn i love too!

 

 Asystasia intrusa can be invasive, but i always have them for, of course you know what! But if isolated in numbers in plates like the above, they can be beautiful too.

 Pentas lanceolata are favored by the Scarlet Mormon. They favor those in umbels because they will not leave the area for another flower, just insert their proboscis in the next flower within the umbel. Butterflies know energy conservation too.

another Pentas lanceolata color form, favored by the tigers

 This hippeastrum is the only species that bloom more than once a year. In fact this is its 4th bloom. When under the net protection it produced 6 flowers in one scape. 

 This is my first time to see the flowers of Curcuma longa or turmeric.  Actually, above are the bracts, the flowers already gone. Those almost rotten debris at the axils of the bracts are the decomposing flowers.

top view of the Curcuma longa bracts

 This is only a leaf, but it is as lovely as a bloom. It is one of the colorful caladiums. 

Hoya pubicalyx 'Black Dragon' syn. Hoya pubicorolla

 My Garden Bloggers Blooms post is not complete without the hoyas. They are the special flowers in my garden with their own enclosure and get more attention from me and my sister at home. I just go home on weekends and i only do some jobs and taking their pictures. I confess my bias is fully with them together with butterflies!

 Hoya alwitriana starting to open. This is one of the very few hoyas that blooms in the morning, most of them opens in the late afternoon.

 Hoya pubicalyx

 Hoya odorata

Hoya bifunda ssp. integra

Hoya nakarensis

GBBD

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)

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