Hi Meyer Mike:) Not sure of the age , but I bought it last year in flower. When it was finished, I put it under lights in the basement [kindof neglected the watering lol] This spring and summer, it went outside in our back yard, in dappled sun. I just started noticing the tiny flower buds about a month or so back. Since I brought it in, it has had natural sunlight,and is in our coolish room. No fragrance as yet,but the little flowers are not open, can't wait to smell them :)

hello, Toni, thank you. i am surprised by the steph. also; and unbelievably, it is getting flower buds again. I used to have it in my upstairs bathroom which gets southern exposure where my hoya is. the hoyas blooms all summer but the steph. would not. i think it was 3 summers ago, i repotted it into a wrought iron hanging basket that is lined with coconut husk fibers (so it is not pot bound) and hung it underneath by balcany outside. it bloomed all summer. when it was time to bring it back in i decided to leave it in that hanging pot and sort of suspend it in a retangular cache pot. the bottom of the hanging basket does not touch the bottom of the cache pot so the roots gets air circulation. when i water it, it never sit in any excess water because it always flows out and i wait until it is almost completely dry and sometimes it is completely dry before i water it again. from that time onwards, in the summer it is in my sunroom with western exposure and in the winter it is in the family room with northeast exposure. this past summer, i gave it a variety of fertilizer: some organic, some chemical; whatever i was giving my orchids, i was giving to it so it was lightly and almost every time i water: 20-20-20; msu; 10-6-16; worm casting, epsom salt, coffee, & sprayed it with superthrive, spray & grow, FE/soap/water mixture, and pure neem oil/soap/water mixture. i still spray with neem oil mixture about once a week (i am paranoid about getting bugs in the house). also check out the info re aspirin on google - had sprayed with that too. I guess I tend to experiment. if the current flower buds mature to flowers, this would be the 3rd time for this year! I hope i remembered everything. puglvr, if you are reading this too, I also used the above sprays and fertilizer on the gardenia too.(actually, in all my plants) sorry I forgot to include them - I use so many different things and i don't even pay much attention as to how much or when: I just do what i feel like at the time and try out whatever i read on the different threads, and buy whatever i don't already have. just remembered, i also use hydrogen peroxide in the water once in a while. sue

Yes, I make the hoop as large as I feel like I can get away with. On my shelves, that's not really very big at all. But at least I can keep wrapping them around and around. The tricky part is wrapping it without clipping any growing tips downward. Sometimes I just wait until the vine's long enough, sometimes I don't wrap all the way around and rewrap it later. Having a few that I started on a smaller hoop, untangling the whole mess while trying not to break any vines, and retraining them to a larger hoop, I feel like my life is improved by minimizing that as much as possible :) Kelly, I took a picture of the topiary Thinker as well! But I particularly love how you caught that lady mid-laugh, on the right side of the pic. I missed Stonehenge and the cow sculpture. And I didn't get close enough to the peacock to see that it had those eyelashes! Too many people were taking pictures of it or with it. I felt lucky just to get a couple pics at all. It's interesting how different pics look with and without flash. I don't tend to use it at all. Makes for the occasional blurry pic but I prefer not to use it. With flash though, you can see all the little details of that bee (I think it's a bee?) Oh, I love sarracenia flowers. I have some pics of those too. Hey, where's your obovata pic? :) I wanted to see if you got a different angle on it. I only took the one photo.

Ok my apologies, first pic is of the SUCKER, second is mom and third is when I just bought it, now that I look closely, it had a bit of verigation on a few leaves when I bought it but I though it was water damage. Well I most definetly lucked out on this one. Lucky me