I received this plant as a cutting from a local collector name Naomi in May of 2020 during the height of the pandemic scare. The cutting rooted quickly and surprisingly put on rapid growth.

The big mistake that I made with this plant is that I never photographed the plant when I had a nice size specimen. As per usual, I generally don’t photograph a plant until I’ve gotten it to flower, and I thought that my Hoya kenejiana Variegated would literally never bloom! It had numerous peduncles that would always blast newly emerging buds. It blasted these new buds scores of times until I had really long peduncles which had never produced a flower.

I finally got sick of it in the summer of 2023 and chopped up the plant into cuttings. I took these cuttings and gave most of them away as freebies to customers who bought my eBay offerings. I saved the worst looking cutting, and what do you think happened? This ugly little cutting actually produced a peduncle, budded up and flowered!

So I learned that I need to photograph a plant even if I think that it will never flower. I still can’t believe that I can’t find a photo of the plant before I chopped it up. I can tell you that this is a plant that whatever they did to its DNA to make it variegated created a strange creature. Many of its leaves would morph into distorted shapes, and I also believed that this was stopping it from flowering. I have no idea why it never bloomed on a large plant with numerous peduncles, but then flowers on a lousy looking cutting. Below you will find a photo of the cutting.

If I ever get my miserable little cutting to grow into a nice looking plant again, I will make sure to photograph it to put on the page I am devoting to it. The regular H. kenejiana would be the one to get if you are looking for a straight forward plant to flower, but if you are looking for something with a showier leaf that you may never bloom, you might want to give the variegated one a try.