My family Hoya

I just found this group while Googling for potting soil tips and thought I'd introduce you to my little girl. We don't let it get big but it's full of history.

My great grandparents had a plant growing on a trellis on the side of their house in Calatafimi, Sicily. When they packed up to come to America, my great grandmother took a clipping and smuggled it through Ellis Island (my mother always insisted that she hid it in her ample bossom). Each of her 9 children got a clipping from that plant, as did their children, etc. This one was passed as clippings from my great grandmother to my grandmother to my mother, to me, to my daughter and back to me (when mine died from root fungus).

There are literally hundreds of people with descendants from that plant in Sicily – family and special friends who attained family status.

My mother's never bloomed for her in her 60+ years of growing it. But it did right after she died and has ever since for my father.

I've had one for 44 years. Mine didn't flower for nearly 25 years after I got it. It did for the first time the day my wife got out of the hospital after a serious illness (she is fine now). It blooms at least twice a year, early and late summer. This current season it's had about a dozen of those magical clusters, dripping their sticky nectar. Our daughter always out-does us: hers had about 17.

Our family always called this plant a "Scrapia". I don't know where that name came from – there may be another plant with that name that it was confused with back in their little town in Sicily. Maybe it was just a local name.

Anyway, I still need to decide what to re-pot it in. It's been a while.