Excellent question.

There's a nice synopsis of the history published on Simone's page, although if you don't read German the auto-translate just adds more confusion to this already confusing topic.

CB tells the same history as Simone and provides her own personal opinion on this page.

Hope this helps?

p's. I got your email, but I can't reply to it because you don't have an email address associated with your GW account.

Feel free to email me directly at greedy.g.ghost@gmail.com if you want to chat privately. My email is posted right on my profile, so you don't have to go through the slightly laggy GW interface.

But to briefly reply, since you asked a question many people do:

I have a lot of plants, but the vast majority of them are immature. Thus, I do a bit of trading but that's about the extent of my capabilities. :)

Thanks for replying to the email GG. I sent you a email btw. I wrote Aleya Gardens on this who sells both plants. Pascal Meyer said: "H. picta : red corona and H. pubera : yellow corona." If that's the only difference maybe they are the same species just with slightly different flower color.

That's interesting. Thanks for sharing. Well, that blurb from CB was from 2006, so it could be that picta is in circulation by now. It seems that even in 2006 there were grounds for believing two separate species existed, even though many plants were being incorrectly called picta.

I have a pubera from TG, a picta from a trade that hasn't bloomed yet, and an aff. picta (IML 0968) from Joni. The blooms of the TG pubera and the IML 0968 look very similar to me although I haven't been able to compare them side to side. Here's Joni's picture:

So... I guess that is a yellow corona? It looks like both to me... ;)

Incidentally, while I was poking around I discovered that Doug has some amazing photos of his picta and aff. picta posted and a video, so I'm going to post the link to those search results below.

Here is a link that might be useful: Vermont Hoyas: Picta Posts