Waxflower

~ Hoya australis ~

APOCYNACEAE

This delicious-looking Waxflower is a beautiful way to bring the bush into your home. Hoya australis will happily sit in a sunlit spot indoors next to your 45 philodendrons. It will climb or dangle and throw out a spray of tiny white flowers with a subtle chocolatey-vanilla fragrance – perfect for a hanging basket near a window so the morning sun can warm up its tiny scented blooms. When its legs get too long, trim them back and plant out as a cutting to create more household friends. In the wild Hoya is well known for attracting butterflies and producing nectar for native bees and small rainforest insects. Hoya can be seen here with one of its keen butterfly pollinators, the Yellow-banded Dart (Ocybadistes walkeri).

WHERE TO LOOK

The Waxflower grows in the subtropical and tropical north-east of the country. It can be found clambering over rocks, mangroves and shrubs on islands, in rainforests and in rocky coastal areas.

Locations → Queensland: Mount Barney National Park, K’gari (Fraser Island) and Paluma Range National Park; NSW: Billinudgel Nature Reserve; NT: Litchfield National Park, Gulung Mardrulk and Kakadu National Park.

FEATURES

This climbing herb can grow 3–10m in length. Its beautiful leaves are bright green, thick and glossy and grow on long leggy stems. Flowers look like perfectly crafted cake decorations and are waxy, white and pink with a tinge of red on each lobe; they measure 1.5–2.5cm. They start out looking like little puffy stars before they open and can be in clusters of up to 40. Seeds come in long pods around 10–15cm long, which split open; the seeds are then dispersed by wind on long, light feathery hairs.

FLOWERING SEASON

Autumn and winter → Hoya is a perennial evergreen flowering between March and July but it can also bloom during spring and any time during the year, depending on location.

PLANTING

It’s a great indoor or a partly shaded outdoor plant that’s widely available from nurseries and online as tube stock. For those more southerly, keep it indoors protected from frost and in a sunny position. Propagate by taking stem cuttings and placing them in water until roots have formed within a couple of weeks. Trim about 1cm above a leaf leaving around 10cm of stem below the leaf and place in a jar in a sunny spot. Plant out once roots are formed. It will make for a great low-water, low-maintenance indoor plant.