While I was elated about flowering my larger plant, my second plant had foundered. It had not grown in months and after taking it out of the pot found massive root rot even in the terracotta pot. So once again, I took two cuttings, and I will start the process over. The silver lining in all of this is that if both cuttings take, then I have increased my stock of the plant. It is always best to have a safety net on these rare Hoyas.

In late February of this year, The larger of the two plants developed a peduncle, but I dared not get too excited as I had a peduncle before and lost it. I guess that I need not have worried as very slowly it began to bud up, and other peduncles began to form. The buds held and it flowered for the first time on May 5th.

My two little plants put on enough new growth that I was having a hard time keeping the net pot wet enough. I made the decision to transplant them into 3 inch terracotta pots, which apparently made a big difference as the plants really started to grow well for the first time since I had acquired the species over a year previously. By Christmas of 2020, I was able to transplant again. The larger of the two plants went into a six inch terracotta pot and the smaller Hoya went into a 5 inch pot.

Being outside last summer did absolutely nothing for the plants except make them deteriorate further. There was no new growth at all and one plant lost one leaf that the bigger of the two plants lost a couple of leaves. It did not look good for the future of Hoya gildingii in my hands! They came back inside in September and held their own with a little bit of new growth actually starting to show on the plants after what seemed like an eternity!

I rooted the cuttings in water and used two, 2 inch net pots with outer cache pots to grow them in as to better monitor when to water. The winter of 2019/2020 these very tiny plants did nothing. One had four leaves and the other had only three. I was determined to get them outside early in the summer of 2020 with hopes that fresh air and cooler temps would bring them around.

I was very excited with this Hoya at first as it started out really well out of the gate, but I made the mistake of bragging on it, and that was the end of that. It went downhill slowly and dropped a couple of yellowing leaves. Before it could get any worse, I inspected the roots which showed moderate rot and were not healthy looking at all. I took two cuttings from the plant hoping to salvage it. Below the foliage of Hoya gildingii:

I received Hoya gildingii as a small rooted plant from Jimmy Meyers from North Carolina in summer of 2019. Jimmy is a great grower and had done extremely well with this plant so I was hoping for the same for myself. Unfortunately it did not turn out that way.

Well, I finally flowered Hoya gildingii, and it was a fair struggle so we will spend the next several days discussing the plant.

These plant pins were new to me, and easily solves the problem of how to pin short or non-existing vines to a medium when trying to root a non-ideal cutting. I have no idea where you can find these as they were sent to me by my great Hoya friend Mandy Lin. I want to thank her personally for this great invention and for the Hoya papaschonii seeds she sent me! Below you can see the pins and how I immediately put them to work.

I think that the yellow/pink version of Hoya hanhiae is my favorite of all of the clones of this plant. For ease of growing, to flower coloration, it is a winner. The photo below is not the best as I tried to get a photo in my grow tent without untangling everything to get the plant out.