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 tells her story.
Most growers meet her plant first. Hoya burtoniae is Burton's hoya, the velvet leaf hoya, a Philippine species with soft, fuzzy leaves that has been in collections for decades. Burton herself began the way many of us do. In the early 1970s she bought a hoya from grower Ted Green that had been sold to her as Hoya globulosa, a name that would prove questionable. Instead of shrugging at the label, she went to the literature itself, gathering descriptions scattered across journals and languages until she understood the genus better than almost anyone outside a herbarium.
On February 12, 1979, the Hoya Society International was incorporated in Georgia. Burton was its founder, and she became the editor of its journal, The Hoyan. She stayed in that editor's chair for twenty three years, through the era when settling an argument about a plant's identity meant mailing specimens and waiting for the post. Her work reached the Fernbank Science Center in Atlanta, where herbarium material, including type specimens, was sent for her examination. Her own name began appearing on species descriptions: Hoya schallertiae in 1982, then obscura, cagayanensis, ciliata, leytensis, and tsangii.
The tsangii story is where her own namesake plant crosses her path again. Burton published the name Hoya tsangii in 1988, but her description, as Kloppenburg's later examination showed, matched a different plant circulating in the trade as DS 70, and that plant was the one he described in 1990 as Hoya burtoniae. The confusion has never entirely left the hobby. Plants labeled burtoniae, DS 70, sp aff burtoniae, and bilobata still trade places on shelves today, which is one reason the plant's identity stays a live question among growers.
Burton kept publishing after the print journal ended in 2002, writing fifty seven issues of P.S. The Hoyan online through September of 2014. Then the trail goes quiet. No photograph of her has been found. A published profile says she died at ninety but gives no date. Her book, Hoyas I Know and Love, appears in the records with two different dates and no located copy. Four printed issues of The Hoyan have been recovered as scans, and her online journal survives whole. An unfinished portrait, but not an empty one. Listen to the episode for the full story, including the society split that gave the hoya world a second journal, Fraterna, and the name Christine Burton left permanently in the botanical record.