Once again, all good things must come to an end. If you are looking for a really cute Hoya that will never get too large for your space, then Hoya microphylla is the plant for you. I have only grown this plant in a high humidity grow tent so I can’t speak for its ability to do well in ambient household conditions, but it is definitely worth giving it a try. It is a slow grower, and it very pricey at this point, but for the collector it is a must have!

My little Hoya microphylla plant looked so terrible in its little homemade pot that I was forced to slightly up-pot it in to something that looked a little nicer. Here is the tiny plant in its entirety:

Here is an interesting flower comparison photo with two small leafed Hoyas from Papua New Guinea. Hoya sp. Im-08 on the left and Hoya microphylla on the right.

The peduncles and pedicels of Hoya microphylla are very thin, almost thread like, making the flowers only want to hang straight down making them very difficult to photograph well. I spent considerable time to gets shots like these!

In this photo, you can see the lightly pubescent surface of the corolla:

Other than perhaps Hoya serpens, I can’t think of another Hoya with blooms that are actually a little larger than its leaves. Here is one of the flowers below shown with a dime for comparison.

The cool temperatures did not phase it however, and may even have helped contribute to it forming a peduncle and bring it into flower. It was endemic to a mountainous region of PNG, so it must have lived in coolish temps. I was however shocked to find that peduncle on such a tiny plant, and when it began forming buds, I looked at it every day with a magnifying glass. It produced four buds, with two opening on day one, one more opening on day three, and the final bud opening on day four. The flowers had no detectable scent.

I paid close attention to the little plant, and even though the root system was not that large it required watering twice a week. I was concerned that the environment of my basement grow tent might be too cool for it, but there was little I could do to change it. My new LED lighting system coupled with HVAC changes, made it much cooler in my basement than it had been in past years. Nighttime temps were falling as low as 55 F, and when the light were on it struggled to make it to 72 F.

I was very lucky that my tiny two inch sprig perked up and began growing roots after a couple of weeks in water. I potted it into a 3 oz clear cup with holes drilled in the bottom, and used mostly coco chips with a little perlite for a substrate. This Hoya sat there not doing much of anything for what seemed like forever, but was probably a few months. It suddenly one day though started to start showing growth points and finally began to grow, albeit slowly.

Hoya microphylla came to me as a very tiny rooted cutting in May of 2023 from my good friend Julie Kennedy. The plant was one of 16 that arrived in the form of a trade, and all of them spent far too much time in the mail. The package spent 3 days just sitting in a postal distribution facility in New Hampshire. When I finally received the package, some of the plants were not in great shape. Hoya microphylla was one of them. After watching it deteriorate for about a week, I looked at the roots which were totally gone. I decided to snip the tiny 2 inch plant and attempted to root it in a small cup of water.