Hi folks. I am really wanting an ilagiorum. I am sort of obsessed with it right now.

I'd love an obscura, and a panchoi, too.

A variegated australis would make me happy to find.

I think this is my first post over here in the Hoya forum. I am Mathew, and live in Denver. I've been collecting hoyas and other plants for many years but only passively buying what I managed to come across in my occasional garden center visits. These days I have a kentianna, serpens, obovata, kerrii variegated, carnosa / carnosa Krimson Princess, shepherdii, burtonae x2...I think, one is for certain, and finally a mystery pubicalyx and a very small mystery hoya I call 'chocolate' because the new leaves are the color of a Hershey bar for several days before gradually turning deep dark green. It's probably just a carnosa of some sort but I fantasize it will turn out to be something amazing and I will have been lucky. It was the unique looking specimen in a flat of 2" hoyas labeled "assorted" which I am fairly sure were all just basic carnosas.

Hoyas and many certain other plants seem to be quite trendy right now, and as a toy collector where scalping has become the norm, I am surprised to see it happening with plants, too. So-called plant-sellers spend their days scouring other plant sellers and buying plants to turn into cuttings and re-sell to obsessed plant newbies with disposable income. I hate it, to be honest - I long for the days where I had to choose only one or two plants from the dozen I really wanted when I went shopping, to now where I sometimes feel I am buying something just to buy something from the same mass of hoyas, calatheas, succulents, and ficus trees that seem to clog up every plant store everywhere. It's like going to Toys R'us before they closed and seeing 75 Darth Vader and Luke figures because every single other character was bought up by a re-seller for eBay.

I am salty about this. lol.

I remember in the late 90s , even up to the early 2010s I could go to most any garden center and find tricolor hoyas, and variegated rope hoyas for $15.99. Maybe $24.99. I worked at a very popular local garden center known for high prices in the early 2000s and we couldn't sell hoya bellas even at clearance prices. Now I can't find one and when I do they're stupid expensive. Like everything. Black Cardinal philos choked the tables at the place I worked, now they're "rare" and folks are paying $25 for cuttings with three roots. '

I moved into my house in 2013, and that summer I got my serpens, kentianna, and kerrii in 2.5 succulent pots for $3.99 each. They'd probably be $30 each, now and an employee is hooking up a friend who re-sells so they never see the retail floor.

So...I really hope the hoya trend dies hard and soon and prices return to the realm of normal. It's really telling that places like Gardino's have to stealth-update their site to fend off the hoard of people waiting to snap up every single unusual hoya in a matter of only hours.

I bought a Krimson Princess in 1998 and I am assuming it must have reverted to carnosa sp. with a splash over the years because I haven't seen new variegated growth since I brought it home. These days it has one single original variegated vine about 6 inches long with 8 nodes...so I cut it off and turned it into two cuttings which I put in leca. It's only been about 24 hours but I am going to go and impatiently stare at them while I wait for them to root. lol

G'night folks!