After posting a video of this wonderful plant on YouTube, a viewer from Java asked me if Hoya sp. Kalimantan SLM-01 and Hoya sp. Buntok were the same Hoya. After googling Hoya sp. Buntok, there is no question that they are the same plant. Buntok is in Kalimantan, Indonesia and is apparently where this plant was first discovered. This page has now been updated to reflect this Hoya becoming a new species in 2021. It is now called Hoya buntokensis

I received H. buntokensis when it was still called Hoya sp. Kalimantan SLM-01 from Jimmy Meyer’s on North Carolina, midsummer of last year (2020) as a tiny plant rooted in a course mix in a 2 inch pot. All I knew of the plant was that it was supposed to get strange “ant-leaves” like those on Hoya darwinii, but was supposed to be much easier to grow. The tiny plant grew steadily and finally put up a vine. It grew much the way that Hoya undulata grows in that forms many leaves at the base, before sending out that first vine. I soon wrestled with how to repot this plant without stressing it out, and avoiding the dreaded root rot!

I finally decided to go with a net pot in which I put leca in the bottom of, and added Lechuza Pon, then filled in around the plant with more Pon. I quickly found out that a net pot does not hold Pon in very well so I needed a cache pot that was pretty tight to help hold in the tiny little rocks. The purpose of the net pot was so that it was easier to see when to water, but now I could not pull the net pot out of the cache pot without losing substrate so it kind of negated the net pot!

It was now impossible to tell when to water this plant so I opted for once a week and since the Pon holds little water, I submerged the pot in fertilizer water. This was purely a guess on my part, and it seemed to be the right guess. I did it religiously every Monday morning for months and the plant thrived. It put on two peduncles in late December (2020) and budded up strongly. The flowers began opening over the course of a few days in early January (2021). There was absolutely no scent, but they were claw like and quite beautiful.

Hoya buntokensis was my favorite new Hoya of the past couple of years primarily for its amazing bronze colored foliage, growth form, and delightful flowers. It gets my highest recommendation!