I have now had Hoya maingayi for just over a year, but it is shown no signs of wanting to put on a peduncle. The plant is now in an 8″ pot and from the bottom of that pot to the top of the trellis, it is 33″ tall. If it does not put on a peduncle in the next year, it may be the first candidate to move on to a new Hoya Hall of Shame List!

For those of you who have been reading my ramblings for a few years, you may remember that it took me years to produce a total of 3 flowers on my Hoya obtusifolia plant. The big problem with the plant is that it only flowers with decreasing day length in the fall. It flowers in October in Florida, I can’t have it outside at that time in Vermont as it would freeze. To make a long story shorter, I moved this plant from a 14 hour days to 12 hour days, and this is the result. It is dripping buds from as many as 16 peduncles. I grew this plant from a cutting started a year ago growing in pure tree fern. Here are a few of those buds:

The nearly impossible to grow Hoya darwinii is growing all over the power cords in the tent. I will need to chop it up soon so that the tent can be replaced. What is interesting is up near the top of the tent, it produced the characteristic ant leaf that gave it the common name ‘Ant Plant’. In the wild ants colonize these leaves and their waste fertilizes the plant. This photo is not very good, but you will get the idea.

I love the flowers and the scent of this Hoya, but for some reason growing like I do in a very high humidity grow tent, it seems to be prone to some kind of bacterial or fungal disease. I am someone that strives for perfect looking foliage so this is a draw back for me. This may not happen at all if the plant is grown in the regular house on a windowsill. I am only giving Hoya Sweet Scent a qualified endorsement, but my experience may be completely different than yours so take it with a grain of salt.

Here is a close up of the flowers of Hoya Sweet Scent:

Hoya Sweet Scent comes from Homchun Nursery, Samut Sakhorn Province in Thailand and is a natural cross of unknown parentage. One of the possibilities is Hoya obovata and Hoya parsitica. The name “Sweet Scent” comes from Homchun, which means sweet perfume in Thai.

Finally after 3 long years I got to experience the flowers of Hoya Sweet Scent. I was expecting a strong floral scent, but was somewhat disappointed in the scent not being that strong. It did however smell very enticing to me like some type of sweet desert.

Finally in May of this year I got this plant to grow and keep its buds. When buds get to this stage, they are rarely ever lost. I was excited to see what the flowers would be like and to get a chance to smell the flowers!

Finally I had enough of the plant, and I took the best two cuttings that I could find that had little or no bacterial/fungal spotting and started the plant over in a conventional mix. I grew two plants as insurance that I could get this thing to flower. This time around it put on numerous peduncles, but for some reason the buds would continually blast when they were the size of the ones pictured below:

I was going through my leca, semi-hydroponic phase when I received this cutting so I rooted it in leca and went from there. It grew rapidly, but as with everything I grew that way the roots eventually went before I was able to flower it. In addition, while I have very little problem with plant diseases there were bacterial or fungal spots on many of the leaves, which was very off putting to say the least. See the circle in the photo below for an example.