My Hoya australis Lisa is so spectacular that we have to spend a couple of days with it. The four foot high plant is covered in buds getting ready to open.

I happened to catch this one flowering in the tent this morning and took a very quick photo. I love the colors present in the blooms on this species.

I will need to rewrite the page that I have set up for Hoya hamiltoniorum as when I look back on what a sick plant I had at the time, it is pretty embarrassing. Other odds and ends to tie up. The flowers do have a scent that while not super strong is definitely noticeable. It is pretty much indescribable, but it is not unpleasant. This is a Hoya that is definitely worth giving a try. Grow it in coconut husk, water once a week, transplant when necessary, give it good light, high humidity and hopefully you will get a plant that looks like mine!

The flowers of Hoya hamiltoniorum open in stages rather than all at once and each flower is very long lived. I have some open now that after 2 weeks still look very strong.

I think two things turned this plant around. The first thing was transplanting it into coconut husk chips which is my now go to Hoya potting substrate. I got it into a routine of dipping the entire pot into a nutrient solution once per week. The second thing was getting these flat mites under control with a spraying of sulfur. Finally I had a healthy plant that rather than struggling to get it to grow, I now struggle to keep the growth in check.

I had never been able to squeeze out more than a single flower from this plant until in March of this year (2023) it finally started to bud out on many peduncles.

I somehow managed to just barely keep this thing growing, when finally it started to hit its stride in the spring of 2022. I was almost afraid to do it, but I transplanted it into coconut husk along with some large perlite and put it into the summer greenhouse. It continued to slowly grow, but after I sprayed all of my plants with sulfur for a flat mite infestation the plant really took off. Hoya hamiltoniorum has never been shy about putting on peduncles but they would never successfully bud up. That was about to change.

I received Hoya hamiltoniorum as a small rooted plant, that Jimmy Myers was kind enough to save for me, from a bad Thai shipment in September of 2019. I struggled with this plant for years having to start it over numerous times. I thought that I had really lost it when I had one cutting left with just a couple of leaves, but as you can see from the photo below, I have a remarkable turn-around story.

I finally have a beautiful specimen of Hoya hamiltoniorum; it took me four years to get here, so we will spend a few days on it.

I could not stand this vine full of peduncles on my plant that is now called Hoya latifolia. These little buds continually fall off like large dust particles all over everything. The flowers on this plant are usually spotty and not all that exciting so I made the decision to lop this off and the plant looks better now.