Back in the summer of 2012 Joni Kahn from SRQ Hoyas contacted me to ask if I would be interested in free Hoyas with the condition attached that she would get the photos if and when they bloomed. At the time, it made a lot of sense as she found that the plants sold far better with flower photos. She came to me as it seemed that I could flower any Hoya that I wanted to, which was never the case, but I did try really hard. Anyhow, of the twenty or so Hoyas she sent me, this was the last one to flower.
It came with an incorrect ID Tag that said Hoya blashernaezii IML 1631, and grew miserably for over five years. I can’t believe how many times I almost threw it it the waste bin. I believe my Noid (No Identification) Hoya is an H. pottsii of some sort for the following reasons. The photos of the flowers and leaves match H. nicholsoniae / H. pottsii photos that I’ve found online, and the huge amount of time it took to flower the plant. I spent over four years flowering another H. pottsii, and this one had more problems and took even longer.
Early on Hoya pottsii ‘Noid’ suffered from suspected root rot problems and rather than start it over at the time, I was hopeful it would eventually grow out of it. This was the WRONG DECISION! 99% of the time it is better to take a cutting in a root rot situation and start the plant over again. I have stuck it out with plants in the past, and once in a rare occasion it will pick up and re-root itself, but in the amount of times it takes, I could have re-started it and had a healthy plant in a fraction of the time. I know that hope springs eternal, but it this case it shouldn’t!
Sometimes when you stick with something long enough, you are loathe to give it up and this was the case with Hoya pottsii ‘Noid’. It grew miserably in fits and starts for so long that it got to the point where there was not even a good enough vine to take a successful cutting from. Why I let it take up valuable space for as long as I did, I will never know.
Update December 2022: All Hoya pottsii are now considered a synonym of Hoya verticillata var. verticillata.