I first heard about Hoya hanhiae a couple of years ago, and since it was newly discovered in Vietnam, I thought that it would take forever to find its way into the trade.  I was wrong and was able to secure specimens from a Thai vendor in short order.

While Hoya hanhiae is closely related to H. macrophylla there are many morphological differences, which a botanist would recognize, but are beyond my ability to describe. Habitat is distributed in secondary tropical evergreen broad-leaved lowland forest on sandy soils in coastal areas in Quang Tri and Nha Trang, Vietnam. The plant was named after its discoverer Nguyen Thuy Hanh in 2014.

Hoya hanhiae flowers are fragrant smelling quite sweet.  Unfortunately, the blooms only last 3-4 days at most. The plant is available in several flower colors. I ordered Yellow, Yellow/Pink, and Purple. I think the vendor pulled a fast one though as my yellow plant bloomed dark pink and my yellow/pink didn’t bloom anywhere near the color of photos I have seen online. It is however possible that growing conditions could affect the color of the flower to a degree.

I have not found Hoya hanhiae to be particularity easy to grow, but that could be because I got off to a bad start by using an extremely coarse orchid bark mix.  I can pretty much say that my experiment using this mix on a number of Hoyas was pretty much of a failure primarily because I could not keep the humidity levels high enough to make it work.

Having moved the plants to a more conventional peat based mix has worked far better, but I find this plant likes to be kept much drier than other Hoyas that I keep.  Since I am a chronic over-waterer, it is not a good combination! The plant likes to be extremely warm to do well, which makes sense coming from the lowlands.  It is capable of flowering at a fairly young age with mine flowering at about 2 years from cutting.

I think Hoya hanhiae has a lot to offer; available in a myriad of flower colors, with handsome foliage and a lovely scent, what’s not to love?  They are now readily available on eBay at a very reasonable cost for such a recent addition to trade.  I would pick one up at your earliest opportunity!