Hello! Welcome back! You have some beautiful plants! Also so glad to hear baby is fully recovered! Next time show us a picture of the precious bundle :). I'm not for sure what you would like for us to call you.
Your plants all look very healthy. My favorites are Imperalis and RHP. And your Carnosa has gorgeous coloring in the leaves.

Thanks for sharing!

Teisa

Oh, silly me! You can call me Deborah. And thanks for the warm welcome! I'd certainly love to show off my actual baby- he is the youngest of four, and not so little anymore, but he's still my baby! Here he is at 4 months just after the surgery, and then there is a pic from yesterday, helping Dad till up the garden for all our veggies soon to be planted. Big difference, huh?

Deborah,

Oh! They grow up too fast dont they? I have a miracle baby myself!! She is 2 yrs old now! She follows me around with a spray bottle, lol! It looks like you have a "little" gardener too!

I think your pottsii may not be a pottsii? I'm no expert, but it looks like a polystachya to me.

Welcome! I love seeing new posters here.

Hmmm... I will look into the pottsii/polystacha thing. I've never seen polystacha and this would be my first pottsii(if it is?). Thanks for the input!

Hi Deborah and welcome back to the Hoya forum. Your plants look great and so does your future-green-thumb son. :)
I know exactly how you feel about having lost your edge during your sabbatical. I feel like my Hoyas can tell when they're not my main focus and won't even root well!

As far as the pottsii/polystachya business goes, I see what goddess is saying, but to me it does look like a pottsii. Pottsii is a big family with a lot of variation and yours looks like some of the ones I have in my collection. Take, for example, pottsii sp. Chiang Mai. In contrast, there are pottsiis in my collection with much smaller, thinner, leaves, like IML 0022.

Of course, the blooms of polystachya are quite different from pottsii, even just in the way the peduncles form, so there is no mistaking the two once you have a blooming sized plant. I've also found polystachya to be a much more generous and early bloomer.

This post was edited by greedyghost on Mon, Mar 17, 14 at 16:20

Just to compare, my pottsii IML 0022 leaves are ~2.5 inches long. My polystachya leaves are ~5.5 inches long and very succulent/thick. Both lengths are without the length of the petiole. YMMV though, as hoyas are notorious for growing very different sized leaves in different environments.

This is one of the reasons keeping the fullest name possible is a good idea. Simply "Pottsii" is not enough for an ID.

But whatever it is, it looks like a great plant - all of them do.

I was just taking a stab...I've seen pottsiis before and never saw a leaf quite so big! Either way, it's a beautiful plant.

I have 'Chiang Mai' and the leaves aren't as huge as in the OP's post. Amazing, easy plant, but not quite the same. It's always interesting to see how the same plant grows in different places!

Sorry if it felt like I stepped on your toes, goddess. It's not like I'm the big expert. It's kind of hard to tell from the OP's photo, anyway, since she only has one leaf so far.

I have a couple pottsiis whose leaves are roughly the same size as my polystachya, although they aren't nearly as thick.

I think generally much of what many hobby growers (especially those inexperienced in ID'ing plants) instinctively use to distinguish species, like leaf shape/size/color, bloom color, umbel shape are inappropriate and unreliable to use because there is so much variability in those factors in the same species and often even on the same plant at the same time.

When I read hoya species descriptions, like in old Stemma issues, those people are very methodical in their descriptions. They know what they are looking at, and they are simply going down the list. Those paragraphs read like Greek because of so many botany words, but I found it useful to google many of those words, so that I can see what those pros see. It's quite amazing - you start looking at the same plants you already have and suddenly notice all sorts of things about them that were flying under the radar before.

Old Stemma issues can be found at the bottom of the page here: http://apodagis.com/asclepiadaceae/hoyas/hoya_index.htm. They are a very good read for many other reasons in addition to hoya descriptions.

Yes, this child is definitely the one that is the most interested in gardening with me! He is such a good helper, and a blessing :)

Thanks for all the insight! I'll try to get some more pics of my "pottsii" tomorrow in the light, since I have two one-leafed ones and one two-leafed one. They are all from the same plant(I assume?), and the listing only said 'pottsii'. I got it from eBay, cowboyflowerman. I know he was popular back when I was still very into Hoyas, so when I saw a familiar face(name, haha), I jumped. The leaves are very thick and succulent-like, pretty hard for a leaf, and they are shiny. I love it, whatever it may be.

Welcome back Deborah!! Love your pictures and your son is adorable :o)

Best of luck with your Hoyas!

GG, nice looking pottsii (s)

Oh that first picture is Doug's plant and the second one is mine, but from back in the day when I first bought it, so Joni's growing. I was way too lazy to take pics of my current plants, do I deserve no praise. ;D

GG, I did not take offense. :) Hoya taxonomy is just as confusing to me as rocket science!

Lol I hear you. I think some of it, as GT says, is hitting the books and studying. And another part of it is just like any type of expertise and the more plants you look at, especially in person, the more the subtle differences are noticed and correctly interpreted by your brain. We are a gatherer species and our brains were designed to differentiate among plants... we just have to sit back and give them time and every year we get slightly better at the name that plant game.