Hoya aldrichii
Hoya aldrichii, commonly known as Christmas Island waxvine, is a species of flowering plant in the Apocynaceae or dogbane family. It is a vine that is endemic to Christmas Island, an Australian territory in the north-eastern Indian Ocean.
Description
Hoya aldrichii is a tall climber with glabrous stems and pale bark. The leaves are entire, elliptic, rounded at the base with a pointed tip, long and wide, on a petiole long. The flowers are arranged in umbels of 15–30, on a thicked peduncle long, that increases in length each flowering season, each flower on a glabrous pedicel long. The sepals are long and the petals are pink or white with lobes about long. The corona is pink or deep purplish-pink with star-shaped lobes long and about wide. The fruit is a glabrous follicle about long and wide containing oblong seeds about long with a tuft of hairs long on one end.
Taxonomy
Hoya aldrichii was first formally described in 1890 by William Hemsley in the Journal of the Linnean Society, Botany. The specific epithet honours Pelham Aldrich, commander of the survey vessel HMS Egeria, which visited Christmas Island in 1887.
This species of Hoya is a common epiphyte in the shrublands of Christmas Island's coastal terraces.