Top 5 Favorite Plants of Summer 2026!

Hello everybody, welcome back to my channel. My name is Becca. This is my channel where we talk about all the houseplant things. Today we're going to be doing a top five favorite plants. I've been collecting plants for a really long time, so I feel like my favorites are always rotating. But honestly, these have been my favorites for a while, so I'm excited to share them with you. We're gonna start with the smallest and easiest to show plant, and that is my Hoya villosa. If me from a few years ago could see this right now, she would not believe it. I struggled with this plant for so long. It looked so bad. It was just like a couple of leaves for literally years. It seems like that's kind of how it goes with my Hoya. They just only have one or two leaves for many years, and then suddenly they decide, I'm ready. So here we are. I actually took a propagation of this plant. That's what this section is. And I just potted it back in with the mother plant a few days ago. So she's looking extra full, and I would like to find some sort of trellis for her. I need to do some shopping for like some plant supplies. The Hoya villosa is a very easy to care for Hoya. It is quite striking. The leaves are very deep green and very, very fuzzy. I just love the way that it looks. I love the way that it grows. It's been such a fun plant to care for, and I also love the veins and the ripply leaves. Just everything about this plant is so cool and fun. It's sentimental to me because this is a cutting from my friend Nicole's plant. I love having a plant with a story. A lot of my Hoya have actually come from friends, and this one is a part of that. Next up on my favorites list is my Jose Bono. For obvious reasons, she is absolutely gorgeous. I will do a pan so that you can see the whole plant. Yeah, you thought it was just this. It's actually all of this as well. So it has definitely doubled in size since I bought this plant. I bought this from a store here in Oklahoma City called, I think it's just called, is it called Happy Leaf? I'll put it on the screen, but it is a like true rare plant shop. I was not expecting to find plants of that caliber when I walked in because, I mean, I don't know. I'm in Oklahoma City, granted, it's a big city, but I just was like, no, there's no way there's gonna be someone collecting plants of this caliber here. Well, we have one, and they're absolutely beautiful. They had some genuinely rare plants, and this is not a rare plant, but it is very beautiful, and I guess we could say it's a sought-after plant. But anyway, I have it in this little pot. I actually think that I need to repot it pretty soon because I've got some roots coming out the bottom, and it has doubled in size. I also have it on this trellis from Treleaf, which is so beautiful. I feel like the plant mostly covers it, but what you can see poking through is so gorgeous, and I love that this plant, when the leaves come out, they have this really gorgeous white, and then as it matures, it turns into this light greenish color. I just think it's fun to have both, and really special to watch them grow and change over time. This plant has also been such a rigorous grower. It's been putting out a new leaf every week, I swear. So it's been really, really exciting to see, and it's also very vocal about its needs, which is another, I need my plants to tell me what they want or else I, a lot of the time, am just walking along in life. I need it to give me lots of visual cues that it is thirsty or has a pest or something is going on, and this one definitely does that. When it's thirsty, these leaves kind of cave down like this, and it's been doing that more frequently lately, probably because it needs a new pot. So this is a plant that I think I'm going to enter into the state fair, and I probably should repot it before then. So we'll see. Wish me luck. Okay, next up, we have a trailing pothos. I'll put the exact variety on the screen because I always forget which one it specifically is, but look at how gorgeous this plant is. This is just the top. It's a very long plant. Like, there's a lot in this trailing vine situation. Let's see how much of it I can get in frame. It is so beautiful. I have struggled with pothos for much of my plant collecting days, but this one in this self-watering pot is really, really happy, and in fact, there's a ton of roots down into, like, the reservoir area, and I very well could repot it into a bigger pot, but I do think that it's just putting out a lot of roots because it's searching for that water, so I'm not going to touch it. I'm not going to mess with it. It should be fine, but I recently took some cuttings of it, and I am probably going to plant it back up top here, or I might just make a new plant. I haven't quite decided because I actually am thinking about taking some more cuttings and, like, kind of practicing manipulating the plant's growth with getting it bushier and stuff like that, and the way that you achieve that is through cutting the plant, doing a little bit of trimming, which can feel scary, but I can assure you that your plants are going to grow a lot bushier and just look a lot better, like, less stringy if there are multiple branches, and the way that you get multiple branches is pruning. So I did that on one of the branches I want to show you. I pruned this one, and as you can see, we have an offshoot going this way and an offshoot going this way, so it branched, and now that I saw that it did that, I wish that I cut, like, more, like, right here in the center because, yeah, I just would like to see it bushier more from the top going down, but then we have this, like, bushy, little skinny section, and then bushy again. Choose an hourglass. Sometimes it really is the most simple plants that make me the most happy, and actually I'll say oftentimes it's the most simple plants that make me the most happy. You do not need to have a ton of, like, rare plants in your collection to feel connected to your plants, to feel like you have a beautiful collection because if you can keep something like this alive, happy, bushy, I think it's way more impressive than a rare plant that has, like, one leaf and looks like crap. You know what I mean? That was a hard lesson that I had to learn for myself when I really, like, sat down and thought about what I want to get out of collecting plants, and I had a whole mindset shift a number of years ago, and it really just, I don't know, changed the trajectory of my collection when I started focusing on plants that I knew were going to do well in my environment rather than plants that I thought would be impressive to an online audience. And speaking of beautiful plants that look like crap in my collection, antherium. Okay, this antherium is a good one. That's why, obviously, it's in the video. I think I'm going to have to back up a little bit to truly show this one because she's big. So this is an antherium magnificum crystallinum, and this one's definitely going to take up like the whole frame. So you can see, we've got these two leaves over here. These two leaves right here, which are the newest ones. Turn it to the side, maybe? Yeah, and then this one right here that's a little bit older, and a couple blooms, and a new one on the way. There's a lot going on here. So this is a, as I said, crystallinum magnificum. Magnificum, antherium magnificum are known for having very, very big leaves, and as you can see, it has definitely taken that on. I got this one from Equagenera when they had a location in California. I don't know if that location is still open. I saw that they closed it, and then maybe it was reopened. I'm not quite sure, but there was a time, and I went there with my friends in 2023, yes, and six years later, I still, not six years later. It has not been six years since 2023, three years later. Oh my gosh, three years later, here she is, and she looks amazing. We've gone through a lot together. She went from living in my greenhouse cabinet to living in, I think that I might have had her in the actual greenhouse for a short period of time before I moved, but then I came here with her, and she has really, really thrived since living here. Like, these leaves really speak for themselves. These two leaves and this one all came out within a couple weeks of, let's say a couple months of each other after not putting out very many leaves for a super long time. So I don't know what happened. I mean, obviously, summer in my plant room is very, very humid, and the light is pretty nice. It sits over on these shelves. You can kind of see them right here. So it's getting ambient light all day, no direct rays or anything like that, and I wasn't sure if it would be happy with a situation like that, but it's been pretty happy, and I'm very pleased to see these huge leaves that have barely any imperfections. Like, a lot of my antherium leaves, especially the, like, velvety varieties will have a little bit of ugliness on the leaves, and this one looks incredible, and it's blooming a lot. Like, I'm actually probably gonna cut this off so that it can just focus on growing this leaf. We did have a bloom right here that self-pollinated, and that is the wildest situation in the whole world. I still need to take off these little berries and see if there is a viable seed in them. I did take off one and saw that there was a viable seed and was like, oh my gosh, what do I do? But I did a plant order recently where I got a bunch of sphagnum moss, so I think I might just, like, stick them in sphagnum moss in, like, a little dome container and see what happens. I don't know. I'm a little stressed out at the thought because I need to act quick, and I'm not very good at acting quick right now, but she's doing incredible, and I'm really excited to see, like, how big this leaf is going to look, and I've been a little eager for it to put out new leaves in general because I would like to cut off these ugly ones, but, like, I don't know. They don't look that bad. They definitely have some crispy parts, but they're a little older, and if they're still hanging on, I might as well keep it there because a lot of my antherium don't have a ton of leaves, so I might as well just keep them, right? Okay, the last plant on my favorites list is my Hoya obovata. She is stunning, stunning, so full and beautiful, and somebody pointed out on a video recently that the leaves are so dark, and they are. They are so, so dark, so beautiful, and it has just become exponentially happier since I put it in this self-watering pot. It's on my pulley system, and, like, this leaf back here, whoa, these leaves back here, I actually don't see very often at all, but look at how big they are. Let me compare my hand. Bigger than my palm. If I add my fingers in there, it's, like, almost as big as my hand. Yeah, there we go. So, yeah, she's really, really happy and putting off a ton of new growth for the first time in, I swear, years. She has been a little bit stagnant in my collection for a very long time, and, like, now that I've put it in this pot, I now know it's because I was, like, severely underwatering it, which I think is the situation for, like, most of my plants. I feel like I was in a flop for a really long time with my plants, and now I just want to take care of them. I want to be around them in a more meaningful way. Like, I don't know. I was just keeping them alive before, and now they're growing so vigorously that it's very exciting to take care of them and see what they're doing. I don't know. It's just, when your plants actually grow, they're a lot more exciting than, admittedly, for a long time. They weren't really growing, and it was because I just wasn't giving them enough water, just enough to keep them alive and looking nice, but not enough to, like, really thrive. So this is what my plants look like when they're thriving, and that's really exciting. Like, it's actually overwhelming how many leaves are here, and mind you, this is a plant that I've had since 2019. So, like, another nod to keeping plants for a long time and really enjoying them in your collection, and it's fun to see how they grow and change as I grow and change, and I'm, like, so excited to see how this one grows and changes because I have not seen it put out growth like this. We have this whole long thing. We've got this thing right here. We've got this little branch starting off, this one right here. I don't know. It's just very, very exciting and fun to see, and I'm very proud of this plant, and, yeah, just taking a moment to look at it up close is making me fall even deeper in love with the reason that I loved it in the first place, which was I loved the, like, sparkly, speckly parts of the plant, and we kind of lost that when I was caring for it before. Like, the leaves were very light green and just not very speckly, and now that it's much happier, they are a nice deep green and have little cute speckle freckle spots, and I love it. Thank you guys very much for watching this video and chatting with me about my current top five favorite plants. As I said, this rotates, so I might be doing another one of these in the fall. These are the ones that have really popped off this summer for me and have been just really exciting to come in here and look at and take care of, but I wanna know what your top favorite plants are. If you have any right now, please put them in the comments down below. I am, like, itching. I, like, wanna buy more plants. I'm just feeling so much more into this hobby than I have in a long time, and it feels really good to return to something that has been so near and dear to my heart for so long, so, yeah, let me know your top favorite plants in the comments, and make sure you subscribe if you haven't already for more plant life content, and I will see you in the next one. Bye.