Hoya carnosa(L.f.) R.Br.

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Herbarium

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

Accession

K001325497

Filed as

Hoya carnosa (L.fil.) R.Br.

Det. by

M. Rodda

Collected

Mooney, H.f. 1950-07-12

Origin

not recorded

The sheet

View the digitised specimen (CC BY 4.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Peak flowering in May. Each bar is the share of Hoya carnosa observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 150 of 198 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. One month has fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for it. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

It is barely found anywhere that freezes. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,469 research-grade observations of Hoya carnosa that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Selections of Hoya carnosa that somebody named and propagated. A cultivar is not a botanical taxon: it is governed by the cultivated-plant code rather than the botanical one, so it appears in no taxonomic backbone, and it has no native range and no wild population of its own. These get no page here, because a cultivar has no photographs, no range and no flowering data of its own, and a page with none of those is not a page.

• ‘Alba’ Q104184710
• ‘Compacta’ Q104184711
• ‘Exotica’ Q104184716
• ‘Krinkle Kurl’ Q104184719
• ‘Latifolia’ Q104184720
• ‘Variegata’ Q104184721

From Wikidata (CC0), joined to this species on its World Flora Online identifier, so the link to the parent is exact rather than a name match. This list is what is recorded in an openly licensed register; it is not every cultivar that exists, and for many genera it is not close. Why, and how far short it falls.

How Hoya carnosa grows, merged from four structured plant databases and a set of traits read from public-domain field guides. This is a record of documented characteristics, not care advice; each value keeps the source that reported it, and a value read from prose is tagged extracted so it is never mistaken for a measured fact.

USDA PLANTS, GIFT, Wikidata, EOL TraitBank (via Zenodo) and traits mined from USDA NRCS plant guides. per source (public domain, CC BY 4.0, CC0). Synced 2026-07-19. Merged per species: USDA PLANTS (public domain) and GIFT (CC BY 4.0) for structured growth traits, Wikidata (CC0) for fruit type and height, and EOL TraitBank via Zenodo (per record CC0 or CC BY). A fifth set is mined from public-domain USDA NRCS plant guides, each value carrying its verbatim quote. Values tagged extracted were read from prose, never a structured record; where sources disagree, every value is kept with its own source.

Kew records Hoya carnosa as a useful plant in these 2 categories. This is a record that the species is used, drawn from a checklist of economically useful plants. It is not a recommendation, a dose, or a safety claim, and where a category reads Medicines or Poisons that is a use somebody documented, not advice from us.

• Medicines
• Environmental Uses

Kew World Checklist of Useful Plant Species. CC-BY 4.0. Synced 2026-07-18.

Species recorded interacting with Hoya carnosa in the wild, grouped by the kind of interaction. These are observations aggregated from many studies; the partners shown are the most frequently recorded for each type, and this is a record of what was observed, not a complete list.

Global Biotic Interactions (GloBI). CC-BY 4.0 (aggregate) / per-source. Synced 2026-07-18. Aggregated across many source datasets by GloBI; at this aggregation level provenance is asserted for GloBI as a whole, not per partner. Joined on the accepted binomial and capped at the eight most frequently recorded partners per interaction type.

What Hoya carnosa is called elsewhere, grouped by language. Recorded verbatim from open sources; where a language has more than one common name, both are shown.

English

porcelainflower, Common Wax-plant

Spanish

Canastilla asiática, Flor de cera asiática

Chinese

毬蘭, 球兰

Portuguese

flor-de-cera

Russian

Восковой плющ, Хойя мясистая

Japanese

サクララン

German

Porzellanblume

French

Dessous de la mariée, Hoya

Italian

Fiore di cera

Dutch

Grote wasbloem

Polish

Hoja różowa

Thai

นมพิจิตร, โฮย่าเกลียวสวาท

Swedish

porslinsblomma

Hebrew

בת-שבע מטפסת

Czech

hoja masitá

Danish

almindelig voksblomst

Finnish

Isoposliinikukka

Slovak

hoja mäsitá

Wikidata (P1843, CC0) + GBIF vernacular names. CC0 / per-source. Synced 2026-07-18. Wikidata is preferred where both sources give a name; GBIF supplements it. Joined on the World Flora Online identifier (Wikidata) or an exact GBIF species match.

Hoya carnosa was named by (L.f.) R.Br., first published in Asclepiadeae 16 (1810). This is the nomenclatural record, who published the name and where, not a description of the plant.

Author

(L.f.) R.Br.

Published in

Asclepiadeae 16, 1810

IPNI

107308-3

IPNI (International Plant Names Index). CC-BY 4.0. Synced 2026-07-18. The protologue citation and IPNI record, joined to this species on its World Flora Online identifier where IPNI carries one, else on the exact binomial with authorship.

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

• Asclepias carnosa L.f.
• Cynanchum carnosum Decne.
• Hoya carnosa var. carnosa
• Hoya carnosa var. gushanica W.Xu
• Hoya chinensis (Lour.) Traill
• Hoya compacta C.M.Burton
• Hoya crassifolia (J.Jacq.) Haw.
• Hoya intermedia A.C.Sm.
• Hoya motoskei Teijsm. & Binn.
• Hoya rotundifolia Siebold
• Hoya skinneriana Kloppenb.
• Hoya variegata Siebold ex C.Morren
• Schollia carnosa Schrank ex Steud.
• Schollia chinensis (Lour.) J.Jacq.
• Schollia crassifolia J.Jacq.
• Stapelia chinensis Lour.

1. 01 World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
2. 02 iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
3. 03 Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
4. 04 Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.