I finally lost my giant chinghungensis plant to sooty mold and flat mites this year, but did start a couple of new plants from cuttings. This is a plant that normally flowers in late summer, but because of the restart, here it is flowering in January!

There are so many Hoyas that fall into this group of easier to flower than to put on new growth. Just a few that come to the top of my head would be: Hoya undulata, Hoya buntokensis, Hoya megalaster, Hoya inflata, Hoya calycina ‘Stargazer’, and Hoya amicabilis. There are many more, but that is all that I can think of right now. Here is Hoya amicabilis from this morning helping to prove my point.

I think that this is the finest Hoya leticiae that I have managed to cultivate to date. It is growing in coconut husk with a little perlite thrown in and really seems to like it. The plant is never out of flower.

I imported a few Hoyas this year from Indonesia, and I believe one of them to be Hoya pulleana, which is newly described by Rodda and Simonsson. This plant has grown wildly well for me, and has numerous peduncles, but thus far has shown no inclination to bud up. It looks like it will be one of those that will take me a fair amount of time to figure out.

It took me years to flower this one, and for most of that time this plant never looked all that great. I now attribute most of my difficulties in growing it to those @#$%# flat mites! The plant actually looks very pleasing to the eye when it is healthy!

I recently washed off all of the sulfur that I applied to my Hoyas to combat the nasty flat mite infestation. I got shamed back into reapplying it as an extra precaution to kill anything that might have hatched from an egg after the first application. Before messing up my beautiful plants with all that white residue, I decided to take a few photos of some of the best ones. Here is plant number one: Hoya sp. UT-247 covered in buds.

It is fairly unusual to get two buds on one peduncle on Hoya patella, but in this case I have it happening in two places on this new plant. Hoya patella is one of the Hoyas that had been badly affected by flat mites over the last few years. It caused many leaves to yellow and look terrible. At the time, I just thought it was something that I was doing wrong, but it was this invisible menace wreaking havoc.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think that I have featured these together yet.

Two lovely Hoyas in flower and hanging out together. It does not seem real, but it is!

Here is a completely full umbel of flowers from this morning; it doesn’t get much better than this!