My Hoya Carnosa

Dance with me! My first ever Hoya flower!!! Woooohooooooooooooo!
And I can smell it, despite a blocked nose and a chest infection...
I love Hoyas. My interest in plants was started at an early age by my mother, who got us to plant out seeds and watch them grow into flowers. Although, I wasn't terribly excited by being able to grow radishes - I hate radishes!
My mother's had these two Hoyas growing in the dining room for longer than I've been alive. They came from cuttings of her friend's plant in Switzerland, which apparently has been there at least since the 1940s. Several years ago these plants got mealy bugs and started to go downhill. I managed to grab a couple of leaves and tried to root them. After leaving them for several months in the greenhouse, sure enough one leaf did start to root and grow a new stem. Hooray! This plant got taken to Bristol for my undergraduate degree, off to Cambridge for my postgraduate degree and now back to Bristol for my postdoc. Since those early days the plant has grown and grown (to tryffid-like size) but never flowered. It had a few knocks and probably didn't get enough sun. Last year it had to go home again and sat in the sunshine and got fed tomato food for a change, which produced new growths, called "peduncles". Oooh. It's been thinking about flowering for a few weeks now but finally I have been rewarded. Yayayayayayayayay!