This Week In Houseplants

Hoya Flowers, New Bug Spray and Some Dusting Gloves

If you’re after a house plant that flowers, you can’t go to far wrong with a Hoya bella. You don’t even have to do anything special to get it to bloom - just pop it close to a window and water it when the soil’s dry.

The flowers are super cute, and look weirdly edible:

They don’t look real, do they? Hoya flowers all smell slightly different - some smell like chocolate, others like caramel or honey, but the bella smells like, er, flowers. it’s just a generic flower smell that is neither offensive nor particularly delightful.

The light definitely affects the flowering. The photo above was NOT taken from my mahoosive mother plant, but from the collection of cuttings I took a year or two ago but couldn’t give away because they got mealybugs.

It is, ahem, not well cared for - that water/glass is grim (but has been cleaned since I took the photo). And still has a mealybug or two. I’m pretty sure the south-facing window is the main factor that influences the flowering.

My Hoya bella mother plants hangs in a north-facing window (in the same room) and whilst she’s covered in peduncles (that’s what the flower is called before it’s a flower) they’re still a few weeks from opening up.

We went to Nunnington Hall yesterday and the gardens were STUNNING.

Unfortunately we couldn’t look around the house because the entrance hall has a LOT of taxidermy on display and I have something of a phobia of dead things (you can get to the toilets through the second hand book shop though, but, alas, not the cafe).

I hesitate to recommend Nunnington itself because it’s not very big and quite out of the way BUT we drove to York after our visit and you pass Castle Howard and it’s a very scenic route.

Then we hit up Deans (of course) and I got myself some new bug spray (it’s basically horticultural soap) and some microfibre gloves you can use to dust your plants.

The gloves are very efficient and I kind of enjoy using them - a phase I’m sure will pass.

it’s the time of year when thrips really like to get their numbers up so I’ve been tackling them on a few fronts. I’ve sprayed a few of my more delicate plants with the sopa, but some of the others I put outside (rubber plants, a peperomia, a ponytail palm and my schefflera). A few of the leaves have scorched BUT the thrips seem to have gone.

My Florida green has had a harsh chop back. Like My Golden Dragon, it has a very leggy growth pattern so I cut it right back to the soil:

…And put the cuttings in water. You absolutely do not have to remove the leaves BUT they can be a pest magnet (I assume the cuttings are releasing wtf hormones - it’s probably quite a stressful time for them tbh) and the petioles are very long so the leaves were everywhere and they produce a LOT of sticky nectar . It just seemed easiest all round to remove the leaves.

I’ll wait until they root, pot them all up together and then no doubt have to repeat the process. I’ll see you here this time next year for another chop back.

My Calathea velvet touch is on my dressing table, so I squish the larvae when I’m getting ready. Lovely, I know.

Absolutely obsessed with this house. Not an aesthetic I’d choose myself but I’d love the opportunity to have it grow on me.

I love the idea of DIY plant sprays but articles like this that fawn over them really don’t express the fact that 90% of plant care is making sure your plant has enough light and is watered properly. This spray will not change your life (if you disagree and think it HAS changed your life, let me know).

Speaking of plant sprays, where are we all spraying our plants? I take mine outside because I don’t want to get the carpet wet. The shower seems the obvious answer but I don’t want to make the floor slippy. Maybe I should invest in a tarp.