Hoya Names

Nathalie Simonsson and Papuahoya: The Woman Behind Forty Three Hoya Names
Some plant names sit on a label for years before you ever wonder about the person behind them. Nathalie Simonsson is the opposite kind of story. Once you see her record, you wonder how the hoya world ever talked about anything else. Simonsson is a Swedish botanist whose name stands as author on forty three published plant names. Most of those names were published with Michele Rodda, the Italian botanist at Singapore Botanic Gardens. Torill Nyhuus, then president of the Swedish Hoya Society, introduced the two of them in 2006.... Read more...
Christine Burton: An Unfinished Portrait
In September of 1909, a collector named August Loher gathered a hoya in the mountains of Luzon, in the Philippines. The specimen went into a herbarium, and there it sat for more than eighty years without a published name of its own. When the name finally came, in 1990, Dale Kloppenburg called the plant Hoya burtoniae, and he named it for a woman in Georgia who had spent years sorting out the names of hoyas for everyone else. That woman was Christine Burton, and this episode of Names Have Roots... Read more...
Hoya anncajanoae: The Roots Ate Ana Left Behind - Gathering Moss
Hoya anncajanoae: The Roots Ate Ana Left Behind
Four living things carry the name of Mary Ann "Ana" Cajano: two hoyas, an orchid, and a cockroach. On paper she was a herbarium technician. The people who worked beside... Read more...
Thomas Hoy, Where Hoya Took Root - Gathering Moss
Thomas Hoy, Where Hoya Took Root
Every time you say hoya, you are saying the name of Thomas Hoy, a gardener who spent forty years at Syon House, right across the Thames from Kew. For a... Read more...
Hoya kerrii: The Roots He Couldn't Leave - Gathering Moss
Hoya kerrii: The Roots He Couldn't Leave
The familiar heart-shaped Hoya carries the name of Arthur Francis George Kerr, an Irish doctor and botanist whose life became inseparable from the plants and people of Siam. Read more...
Hoya clemensiorum: The Rooted Wanderers - Gathering Moss
Hoya clemensiorum: The Rooted Wanderers
Hoya clemensiorum is named for two people, not one. Mary Strong Clemens buried her husband in a New Guinea jungle in 1936 and wrote it on a herbarium label. Then... Read more...
The Plantsman of Dee Why - Gathering Moss
Hoya meredithii: Roots of Controversy
Hoya meredithii is named for a man almost nobody can find. Ted Green wrote down exactly who he was in 1988, and a contemporary said the paperwork behind it was... Read more...