I purchased Hoya imperialis Palawan from AH Hoyas three years ago in May of 2015. The vendor’s number for the plant was AH-283. The rooted cutting that I received did not respond well to my care and languished for around 18 months. Tired of looking at my half dead plant that just sat there and did nothing, I finally decided to pull it out of the pot and check the roots. They were half rotted, so I took a cutting and decided to put it into a 3 inch net pot, which I had just barely started using. Net pots are probably the best discovery that I have made in growing Hoyas in the past few years. I did not come up with the idea, but I have made tremendous use of it!
As soon as I started using the net pots, my little cutting of Hoya imperialis Palawan started to prosper. I moved it up from a 3 inch net pot, to a four inch, and then a five inch relatively quickly. I could finally see what I was doing as far as the watering was concerned by checking the sides of the pot to check for dryness. I finally had so many roots coming out of the five inch net pot that I was afraid to remove the plant from the pot for fear of hurting the plant. I made the decision to sink the entire net pot with plant into a much larger regular pot. The plant continued to flourish, and developed its first peduncle at six months of age, which it lost a couple of months later.
Within a couple of months of losing that first peduncle, Hoya imperialis Palawan developed another one, and this time I moved the plant out of its tent and put it on a windowsill in the regular house. This would have been in late April of 2018. It started to bud up, and I could hardly hide my excitement. The buds got to about 1/4 inch in size, and began to yellow after watering. At first I tried to kid myself that it wasn’t happening, but alas they yellowed further and all fell off. This was the notorious Hoya imperialis bud blast that I almost never experienced with my super Rauschii seedling clone.
Heartbroken over losing the buds, I decided to move the plant out to the greenhouse over the summer. It did pretty well growing three to four feet of new vine, and another peduncle, but there was no sign of budding up. When I brought it back indoors in September, I put it along with some other tall Hoyas into a 3’X3’X72″ grow tent with a strong LED Light. The tent and light made all the difference in the world; the plant finally started budding up in a big way on one of the new peduncles that it had put on over the summer, and these buds made it to maturity and opened in early November of 2018.
What can I say, I love Hoya imperialis, and it was a thrill to bloom my third clone of the plant. It only took 19 months after I had the right system in place to flower this wonderful Hoya, and if you have the room, I can heartily recommend it to every one!
