And now a series of flower comparison photos. It gets more difficult to fill this daily blog with material so this helps keep it going.

The flowers are tough, leathery, and have no detectable scent. They drip very little nectar, but it is extremely thick and sticky. The blooms begin to open in day light and take about 36 hours to fully reflex, and are about 2 centimeters point to point, They are long lasting staying on the plant for about two weeks. They are jet black when dried.

I believe that If I had known just what the issue was with the bud drop, I could have flowered this plant at least a year earlier. So instead of taking 2 1/2 years, it could have been done in a year and a half with strong enough lighting. I do not believe that the oyster shell helped this particular plant and probably made it chlorotic. My first specimen looks beautiful and it is only potted in husk and perlite. It has never produced many peduncles, or budded up, but it does not receive near enough light living on a windowsill.

In early January of this year (2026), I thought I watered the plant too much, and instead of putting it back inside of its terracotta cache pot, I flipped the pot upside down and set the plant, in its clear orchid pot, on top of the cache pot. I thought that it would help the pot dry out quicker, but it also had the effect of moving the plant very close to the powerful LED light that hung over top of it. I did not think much more about it, but next week on watering day I noticed that the buds on the very top were not yellowing and falling off, but actually getting bigger.

After losing hundreds of buds over a year and a half, it turned out that dumb luck more than anything else helped me solve the problem. The plant never got enough light to make the buds mature until I moved it extremely close to the light source.

After those initial buds fell off, over the next several months the plant developed many more peduncles and the buds always yellowed and fell off. The plant itself looked terrible and since I had two, I came close to throwing it out. Finally I hung it outside in the shade in the summer of 2025, and while the plant gradually improved by the end of the summer it still continued to lose buds. Because the plant looked better, I brought it back inside, and put it into a grow tent where it continued to blast buds. I figured the reason why it could not bring buds to term was because I could not get the water right. Below is a recent photo of what my good Hoya ciliata looks like:

We now move forward to the three year mark since I first received the cuttings. The plant that I started over a year earlier grew steadily, but never looked good. I constantly fought chlorosis and while the plant never looked happy, I was beyond ecstatic when I found a peduncle with what looked like developing buds. In my mind I had already flowered it; that thought turned out to be completely delusional. Those initial buds yellowed and fell off.

Around the two year mark, one of my potted specimens developed root rot and needed to be started over. I took several cuttings and potted them up in a mixture of coconut husk chips and oyster shell. All that I knew about Eriostemma Section Hoyas was a remembrance of what Carol Noel posted several times in the Hoya forums of the day. She said that they needed full sun, lots of calcium in their soil mix, warm temperatures, and had to get big enough to hang down in order to flower. The one thing that I could most easily provide was the calcium from shells in their mix so that is why I used this mix.

I once wrote a post that was more of an essay about why I would never try to grow Hoya lauterbachii. At the time, it had never been flowered indoors. As of this writing, it has now been flowered a couple of times in large greenhouses including in California by April Mall. I was happy that the plant I thought I had turned out to be Hoya ciliata; I thought with a little luck and persistence maybe it could be flowered in Vermont.

Mary Carroll was kind enough to send me two cuttings of Hoya ciliata in June of 2022. She took the cuttings May 15th of that year when she still believed the plant to be Hoya lauterbachii. I potted them up separately and began to grow them out. In May of 2023, Mary finally bloomed her plant after around 15 years of growing it; the flowers confirmed that the plant she had purchased and grown as H. lauterbachii was in reality Hoya ciliata.

The species name is a reference to the hairs on the margins and Elmer wrote in his classification of “cilia” on the sepals and also peduncles. The leaves are also hairy.