So I got the one in the pot a couple months ago with the typical Costa Farms “Krimson Queen” ID tag. But I also have one that is older which I am restarting from the pictured cuttings which was a similar tag except that one also has **Hoya carnosa ‘Rubra’** on its tag as well. I’ve heard that there are two “strains” of Krimson Princess and I’ve got to say the one that is ‘Rubra’ over time develops very large leaves in good light, unlike the potted one which always stays small. Any idea? I’ve heard ‘Exotica’ floating around for some KPs, is that possibly applicable to the potted one?
Thanks!!
by makobebu
3 Comments
honestly i’d leave it at “hoya carnosa inner variegated” 🤓
Agree that this is carnosa inner variegated. Beyond that, you can’t really pinpoint the cultivar unless you bought it with that name. Krimson Princess is an expired trademark, not an actual name, for the actual carnosa variety ‘Rubra’ but it has been used inappropriately for so long that there’s really no way to even pinpoint which ones are the real ‘Rubra.’
I’ve actually done a good amount of research into this topic., so I always love to explain, because it’s a complicated issue.
Krimson Princess is the expired trademark for specifically Hoya carnosa ‘Rubra’ plants sold by the company that created and patented ‘Rubra’, and owned the trademark for Krimson Princess.
Over the years since ‘Rubra’ was patented, people began to mistakenly think that any Hoya carnosa that exhibits inner variegation is Krimson Princess, and so it became the default name people used for this group of cultivars (‘Exotica’, ‘Picta’, ‘Marlea’, ‘Rubra’, and possibly more inner variegated clones that independently mutated)
The result of this issue is that there are multiple different plants sold as Krimson Princess, and most of the time (in my country, at least) they’re not even ‘Rubra’.
Neither of your plants particularly looks like ‘Rubra’, which exhibits extremely saturated colour in the new leaves, that gradually fades. The variegated portion comes in a dark dark reddish purple, and the green portion comes in blacking brown. The variegation eventually fades to cream/white and and non-variegated part fades to green.
Unfortunately the other inner variegated carnosa clones I mentioned are not described in as much detail as ‘Rubra’ was, in its patent… and are thus not reliably able to be determined with certainty.
The man who created ‘Rubra’ spent years and years meticulously selecting the traits to create the optimal plant. He selected for things like a more upright growth habit, thicker stems, general vigour/health, and colour, and then described it in exhaustive detail.
A similar case exists with another of his creations, Hoya carnosa ‘Tricolor’, which was trademarked Krimson Queen. A lot of plants sold under the name Krimson Queen nowadays is not ‘Tricolor’.
If you would like to read more about these specific Hoya cultivars and the man and his company that created them, I highly recommend the article “From The Garden of The Leprechauns” in Stemma Journal 7(1). It’s available for free online as a PDF on the Stemma Journal website. 🙂