Hoya desvoeuxensis has really shocked me by almost never being out of flower since it matured. Right now it has at least 20 developing buds or flowers that are open. It is hard to walk by it without taking a photo. A big shout out to Julie Kennedy for making this plant available to me! Below the fronts and back of the blooms:

Hoya aff. lambii is not much of a plant to look at, and the flowers only stay open for a single day, but it tries to make up for these shortcomings with a high blooming frequency. This is probably the sixth flowering in the past couple of months.

Flowering this plant is such a rarity, we have to spend a second day with it! Below the entire plant in the greenhouse along with its fully opened flower.

Shockingly Hoya acicularis has flowered for the second time this summer after waiting nine years between the first and second flowering. I think that this is a plant that needs to be exposed to the fluctuations in day length, and temperature that can be found outside in the summer to trigger flowering. Below the flowers just beginning to open:

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. Below is a gallery of closeups of the blooms:

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.

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 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! Below the plant:

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. Tomorrow I will go into the big mistake that I made with this plant that still makes me mad.

Tomorrow I will begin the discussion on Hoya kenejiana Variegated. Here is a couple of teaser photos of the flowers:

They are flowering at the same time – so why not?