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.

Hoya Sweet Scent arrived to me as a cutting in a trade with Jimmy Myers of North Carolina in the fall of 2019. It looked like one of those easy to grow fast blooming Hoyas that was not to be the case.

I have not been growing this Hoya long enough to really talk definitively about it. The flowers are identical to the regular Bella, and the foliage seems to change color depending on how much light it gets. Below the flowers of Hoya Bella Anneke Buis, AKA Hoya Bella Albomarginata and another plant with a lighter leaf color:

I received this Hoya in a trade this spring and have been pleasantly surprised at how well it has done for me. It is growing in a heavier mix than I am used to, but so far so good!

It is hard to beat the good old fashioned Hoya Bella. Tomorrow we will look at Hoya Bella Anneke Buis, AKA Hoya Bella Albomarginata

These two plants were flowering at the same time; so why not?

I took a photo this morning of Hoya sp. Sarawak “Pink” with its almost perfect shaped heart-shaped leaf. I then just for fun played around with the replacing the background feature of my photo processing software, which I have never been successful in using. Although far from perfect, his time I did much better with it. The top photo shows the original picture and the bottom shows only the leaf with the background and vine removed.