So, I was snooping around the internet trying to find some info on H. loyceandrewsiana. I found a website for a gentleman in California named Dale Kloppenberg. He is a research agronomist who has spent a lot of his lifetime in field collection and study of Hoyas, and has written 54 books about Hoyas.
He had a 'contact me' button so I sent him my query for possible info about H. Loyceandrewsiana.
I think that Mr. Kloppenberg and Ted Green, who lives in Hawaii and own's 'Rare Hoyas', are fellow researchers. Ted Green is also a field researcher and collector who has done work in many many countries wild collecting and describing Hoya and Dischidia, and has been responsible for the introduction to the US plant trade most of the hoya and dischidia species we are able to commonly buy and grow today.
My Klopperman sent me a scanned copy of the 1994 article in Fraterna, written by Ted Green re: h. loyceandrewsiana. I will paraphrase the applicable info here:
C1968, Ted Green received a cutting of a hoya from a lady named Loyce Andrews of Granbury Texas. She was calling this hoya Diversifolia B for unknown reasons, as it was nothing like the real H. diversifolia.
Mrs. Andrews and a huge collection of hoya that had been collected from many sources but all of her records had unfortunately been destroyed and she could not remember where the hoya in question had come from.
Mr. Green believed that it possibly came from a trade she had made with the University Botanic Garden in Utrecht, Holland.
Mr. Green grew the cutting out and observed that under natural outdoor conditions that it seems to have come from a monsoonal area such as the Tenasserims, the range between Burma, and Thailand, or Southern Indonesia. He noted that it exhibits the same growth habits as plants from that area: H. subquintuplinervis, H. pachyclada, H. rigida and some forms of H. kerrii.
At first Mr. Green believed Mrs. Andrew's mystery hoya to be a species variation of H. dolichosparte from Indonesia but noted that it differed on several key points.
Mr. Green further states that in his 30 years of Hoya research, he has looked at hundreds of herbarium sheets and read all of the original descriptions of Hoya species and has never found Mrs. Andrew's mystery 'Hoya diversifolia B' described anywhere.
Based on this he believed that the plant should be declared a new species, and named it Hoya loyceandrewsiana Green.
Ann Wayman, who was at the time this article appeared the Editor of the hoya publication Fraterna, wrote that of all the hoya species she has ever grown, Loyceandrewsiana has been the most rewarding as far as flowers go. She too has researched even piece of Hoya literature available to try and definitively ID this hoya but the taxonomy of species that seem to be closest are still quite different in key respects.
This hoya can produce 70 or more flowers that can stay in bud for several weeks and then they all open at once, in a time frame of only a few minutes.
Ted Green also states in his description of this plant on the Rare Hoyas site that it produces the heaviest leaves known, that some people believe it is H. latifolia, but he continues to believe that they are incorrect.
The Fraterna piece goes on to say that from the original small cutting he received from Mrs. Andrews, he has grown 2 large plants and also sent cuttings to hoya collectors worldwide. This is THE most sought after hoya he has ever offered.
So this is the extent of the data available on my Hoya loyceandrewsiana. I suppose that if DNA research were done on this plant and latifolia perhaps the mystery might be solved once and for all. But if that will ever happen, who knows? So until disproven, I will continue to call my own plant Hoya loyceandrewsiana.
its really nice to have a new voice on the forums! I have known several very eccentric plant people LOL. I had a friend who worked for Glasshouse Works for a number of years before she left the North and moved here, she grew some unusual succulents for them.
Oh wow, those are huge!!! I hope the one that I got from you in trade takes off when this spring ... so far, it's just sitting there!!
