Flowers
Hoya flowers are all shaped like five pointed stars. Some of the species' petals reflex so far that the flowers appear to be round or ball-like. They grow in umbels, or in some species singly. Umbels can reach impressive proportions in some species, and many species have individual flowers well over three inches in diameter (H. imperialis Lindl., H. lauterbachii K. Schuman). H. coriacea Blume has been known to have as many as 70 in an inflorescence, each individual measuring nearly 2 cm in diameter with the umbels over 30 cm in breadth. The single-flowered Hoya pauciflora Wight makes up for its paucity by its flower size of nearly an inch and a half in diameter produced at any time of year. Textures of flower surfaces may be glabrous and shiny, to matte, to finely haired, and some being quite hairy. One of the two clones of Hoya mindorensis Schltr., from the Philippines, comes very close to being a true red. Blue, purples, and violets do not appear to be represented in the genus Hoya.
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Famous quotes containing the word flowers:
“Only the white, tremendous foam of the street has any importance,
The new white flowers that are beginning to shoot up about now.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Nature has from the first expanded the minute blossoms of the forest only toward the heavens, above men’s heads and unobserved by them. We see only the flowers that are under our feet in the meadows.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Bees plunder the flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram. Even so with the pieces borrowed from others; one will transform and blend them to make a work that is all one’s own, that is, one’s judgement. Education, work, and study aim only at forming this.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)