This is only the second time that this has happened to me. I have flowered Hoya macgillivrayi dozens of times, but with only one exception it has always involved using supplemental grow lights. That previous exception produced only one flower; on this occasion I got four.
When this plant first became available it was insanely expensive, and I stayed away from it. After picking one up a few years ago on a lark, not all that enthusiastically, it turned into one of my most spectacular plants. It is now available almost everywhere for very cheap prices and I encourage everyone to have this plant in their collection. It is the easiest to grow of any variegated Hoya that I have ever attempted and the most rewarding.
My Hoya australis Lisa is so spectacular that we have to spend a couple of days with it. The four foot high plant is covered in buds getting ready to open.
I happened to catch this one flowering in the tent this morning and took a very quick photo. I love the colors present in the blooms on this species.
I will need to rewrite the page that I have set up for Hoya hamiltoniorum as when I look back on what a sick plant I had at the time, it is pretty embarrassing. Other odds and ends to tie up. The flowers do have a scent that while not super strong is definitely noticeable. It is pretty much indescribable, but it is not unpleasant. This is a Hoya that is definitely worth giving a try. Grow it in coconut husk, water once a week, transplant when necessary, give it good light, high humidity and hopefully you will get a plant that looks like mine!
The flowers of Hoya hamiltoniorum open in stages rather than all at once and each flower is very long lived. I have some open now that after 2 weeks still look very strong.
I think two things turned this plant around. The first thing was transplanting it into coconut husk chips which is my now go to Hoya potting substrate. I got it into a routine of dipping the entire pot into a nutrient solution once per week. The second thing was getting these flat mites under control with a spraying of sulfur. Finally I had a healthy plant that rather than struggling to get it to grow, I now struggle to keep the growth in check.
I had never been able to squeeze out more than a single flower from this plant until in March of this year (2023) it finally started to bud out on many peduncles.
I somehow managed to just barely keep this thing growing, when finally it started to hit its stride in the spring of 2022. I was almost afraid to do it, but I transplanted it into coconut husk along with some large perlite and put it into the summer greenhouse. It continued to slowly grow, but after I sprayed all of my plants with sulfur for a flat mite infestation the plant really took off. Hoya hamiltoniorum has never been shy about putting on peduncles but they would never successfully bud up. That was about to change.
I received Hoya hamiltoniorum as a small rooted plant, that Jimmy Myers was kind enough to save for me, from a bad Thai shipment in September of 2019. I struggled with this plant for years having to start it over numerous times. I thought that I had really lost it when I had one cutting left with just a couple of leaves, but as you can see from the photo below, I have a remarkable turn-around story.
