Hoya anncajanoae: The Roots Ate Ana Left Behind

Companion post to Names Have Roots, Episode 5

Four living things carry her name. Two hoyas. An orchid.

And a cockroach.

Her name was Mary Ann Cajano. The people she worked with called her Ana. And on paper, she was a technician.

So how does a technician end up on a cockroach?

I didn't start out asking that. I started with a plant tag. Hoya anncajanoae. Growers who have it say the flowers smell like caramel and drip a lot of nectar. Noses differ, and I don't own this plant, so I can't vouch for the smell myself. For a long time that was nearly all I knew about it. That, and I could barely say its name.

Then I followed her through the paper trail she left. One of those four names came with a sentence I still can't read without stopping.

We'll get there.

The name on the tag

First, the title of this week's episode, "The Roots Ate Ana Left Behind." Ate, said AH teh, is not the past tense of eat, which is good news for everybody involved. In the Philippines it's what you call an older sister, as a mark of respect. The museum's tribute video to her calls her Ate Ana.

Now the tag. Anncajanoae is a mouthful, but break it into pieces and it's Ann, plus Cajano, plus a Latin ending that means "of." The plant is named, more or less, "of Ann Cajano." I say it ann ka ha NO ay. I worked that out from how her surname would be said in Filipino. It's my best attempt, not something her family told me, so if you knew her and I've got it wrong, tell me and I'll say it your way.

She turns up under a few names. The plant says Ann. The museum's press releases say Mary Ann. The people beside her called her Ate Ana, and the tribute video's own title spells it Anna. I haven't found a single record where all of those show up together.

Seventy thousand sheets

Ana worked in the Botanical Herbarium of the Museum of Natural History at the University of the Philippines Los Baños, in Laguna Province.

If you've never been inside one, a herbarium is a library where every book is a dried plant. Each one is pressed flat, mounted on a sheet, and labeled with where it grew, when it was collected, and who collected it. The label matters as much as the plant, because without it nobody can check anything.

The museum's tribute says she spent her working life looking after more than seventy thousand of those sheets. The university calls its herbarium the second largest in the country. Keeping that many specimens in order, and safe from damp and insects in a climate where damp is the norm, isn't a job you can do halfway.

What did her days look like? I can't tell you. I couldn't find anyone who wrote that down.

I looked.

What I can tell you is her title, and that's where it gets interesting. The museum's press releases call her a technician. Kloppenburg's newsletter Hoya New lists her as a herbarium associate. And the museum's own tribute calls her a "field botanist par excellence," recognized for "her outstanding knowledge of Philippine plants and her skill and mastery of herbarium curation."

The distance between the first of those and the last is what I kept running into, everywhere I read.

Two names on one label

Her name starts turning up on scientific papers in 2006, on a new species of Rafflesia from Mount Isarog. Rafflesia is the corpse flower. Enormous blooms that smell like rotting meat, which puts it about as far from a caramel scented hoya as a flower can get. The paper ran in the Kew Bulletin with three authors, and she was one of them.

Later that same year, on November 29, 2006, Ana went out with a colleague, Dr. Simeona Siar, known to her friends as Monina. In Barangay Kapatalan, in the town of Siniloan, at about 300 meters (call it a thousand feet), they collected a hoya.

Both their names went on the label, under collection number 5923. That pressed plant became the holotype for a species that didn't have a name yet.

A holotype, real quick, is the one specimen everybody goes back to if they ever disagree about what a name covers. The anchor. This one is still in the herbarium where Ana worked, filed as CAHUP 70358.

One plant. Two women's names on the label. And no name on the species.

Not yet.

For whom we have named this species

In 2008, Dale Kloppenburg and Monina Siar published it in Asia Life Sciences as Hoya anncajanoae. Ana was alive to see it.

What I wanted most was the reason for the name, in the authors' own words. I still haven't been able to read the 2008 paper itself. But Kloppenburg's own species file for the plant, in his reference work Hoyas of the World, says it was collected by Ana and a colleague "for whom we have named this species."

So the reason for the name isn't me guessing from the spelling. They said it themselves.

That file isn't tidy, and I won't pretend it is. It names a different colleague than the label does. It dates the plant 2007 instead of 2008, probably because the paper reached the journal in November 2007. And it gives Ana a title, director of the National Herbarium, that no other source I found supports. I'm trusting it on the one thing it is best placed to know, which is why Kloppenburg picked the name.

A few grower sites call her the plant's discoverer. The record supports collector. I think that's the better word anyway, because a specimen with your name on its label is something anybody can go and check.

The clock

It turns out Hoya anncajanoae wasn't the first.

The museum's tribute counts a hoya subspecies from 2007 among the names that honor her: Hoya heuschkeliana subsp. cajanoae, published by Kloppenburg and Siar in Fraterna, the journal of the International Hoya Association. I haven't been able to read that article, so I'm leaning on the museum here. If they're right, that subspecies was the first plant ever named for her.

And she kept going. Her name is in the author citation of Hoya espaldoniana, published in 2014. In February 2015 she was on the team that collected a new species of jade vine in Mulanay, in Quezon Province. Her name is on the label of the type specimen, Cajano and Alejado 7708, collected February 5 at 295 meters. She shares credit for the species name, Strongylodon juangonzalezii, and the paper credits her, along with Michelle Alejado, for the photographs of the vine growing in the wild.

She died about ten months later, on December 6, 2015.

When the jade vine paper came out in 2016, its acknowledgments said so.

The cockroach

Which brings us back to the cockroach.

Yes. Really.

It's called Anaplecta anncajanoae, described by the entomologist C. C. Lucañas in The Philippine Entomologist. The specimen the name rests on is a single male, caught at a light on Mount Makiling at Los Baños on May 31, 1947, by L. B. Uichanco. It has been in the museum's collection ever since.

Decades in the collection, waiting for somebody to give it a name. That only works if somebody keeps those cabinets in order the whole time.

This is the dedication, word for word:

"The species is hereby named after the late Ms. Mary Ann O. Cajano, formerly Museum Technician I, in the Botanical Herbarium of the UPLB MNH, in recognition of her contributions to the field of plant taxonomy, particularly on parasitic and epiphytic plants of the Philippines, especially Rafflesia and Hoya."

Museum Technician I.

There it is again. The title, sitting in the same sentence as the words plant taxonomy. In a paper about a cockroach.

The orchid

The fourth name came in 2016, in the journal Phytotaxa.

It's a small orchid with no leaves. It lives on the rainforest floor and gets what it needs from fungi. Gastrodia cajanoae. Its five authors, Pelser, Doble, O'Byrne, Ormerod and Barcelona, wrote that they named it in honor of Mary Ann O. Cajano of the herbarium at the University of the Philippines Los Baños.

Then they described her. This is the sentence I told you about at the top, exactly as it appears in the paper:

"a great friend and colleague who passed away in the morning of the discovery of this new species in Negros Occidental."

The morning of.

Who she was

Mary Ann O. Cajano was born in 1959. She died in December of 2015.

I don't have her birthday, so I won't give you an age. I don't have a hometown, a family, or the story of how she came to the herbarium. I looked.

What exists is a body of work, and what the people beside her said about her. The museum's tribute video calls her a "passionate and highly skilled botanist," and says her greatest feat was helping describe new species of hoyas, Rafflesias, and a jade vine. The tribute opens on a portrait of her, with her name on the screen. It's the only picture of her I could find, and I'm glad it exists.

Back to the tag

So, four names. A hoya subspecies in 2007. Hoya anncajanoae in 2008. An orchid in 2016. And a cockroach whose dedication calls her "the late" Mary Ann Cajano.

Two reached her while she was alive. Two came after.

When I read that name on a plant tag now, which is a lot of letters for a little plastic stake, it points somewhere. To a herbarium in Los Baños. To two women in Laguna in November 2006, putting both their names on one label.

What stopped me cold in this one was the gap. The one between what your paperwork calls you and what you actually were. Her paperwork called Ana a technician. The people who worked beside her wrote something else down, and they wrote it where it would last. In a hoya. In an orchid. Even in a cockroach.

A tag doesn't have room for any of that. This page does.

If you knew Ana, or worked with her at the UPLB herbarium, I would love to hear from you, starting with how she said her own name. I will add it to the permanent record, and I will put your name on it.

Next week: Hoya burtoniae

Next week it's Hoya burtoniae, and Christine Burton.

If you read the Hoya meredithii post, you have already met her. She's the one who went back through Ted Green's old sales catalogs and argued that meredithii was never a new species at all.

She edited The Hoyan, a hoya publication that started in 1979. In 2002 she launched her own newsletter, P.S. The Hoyan, and in its very first issue she went after Green's catalog naming and called Dale Kloppenburg his "accomplice."

This is the part I can't square yet. Twelve years before that, Kloppenburg had named a plant for her. "I have named this species for my friend and coworker," he wrote in 1990. "Her contribution to the present understanding of the taxonomy of the Hoya Genus has been invaluable."

Friend and coworker in 1990. An "accomplice" by 2002. Both are in print, in their own words.

Next week I want to find out how both of those things can be true.

Every hoya has a name. Every name has a story. Let's find the next one.

Phil

Hear the full story in Names Have Roots, Episode 5: Hoya anncajanoae: The Roots Ate Ana Left Behind. New episodes every Tuesday.

Sources and References:
Kloppenburg, D. and Siar, S. V. (2008). Hoya anncajanoae Kloppenb. & Siar. Asia Life Sciences 17(1): 62 to 66. Citation per IPNI and AGRIS; the original text has not been seen by me.
International Plant Names Index (IPNI): urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:77104788-1. Type Siar & Cajano 5923, 29 November 2006; holotype CAHUP 70358, isotypes CAHUP 70359 and 70360.
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew: Plants of the World Online (POWO), accessed 2026. Philippine Plants (philippineplants.org), Apocynaceae.
Kloppenburg, D. Passport: Hoyas of the World, Volume I, Species Files (first edition 2001, updated 2007), p. 53. Source of "for whom we have named this species." This entry names Blas F. Hernaez rather than Siar as Cajano's fellow collector and dates the species 2007; IPNI and the type record give Siar and 2008, and I follow them.
Kloppenburg, D. Hoya New 2(1), January 2014. Cajano as Herbarium Associate, UPLB.
Kloppenburg, D. and Siar, S. V. (2007). Hoya heuschkeliana subsp. cajanoae. Fraterna 20(4): 9. Not seen; the link to Cajano rests on the UPLB museum tribute.
Barcelona, J. F., Cajano, M. A. O. and Hadsall, A. S. (2006). Rafflesia baletei. Kew Bulletin 61(2): 231 to 237.
Hadsall, A. S., Cajano, M. A. O., Lambio, I. A. F. and Alejado, M. (2015). A new distribution record of Hoya espaldoniana Kloppenburg, Siar & Cajano (section Acanthostemma).
Hadsall, Alejado, Larona and Lambio (2016). Strongylodon juangonzalezii Hadsall, Alejado & Cajano. PhytoKeys 73. Holotype Cajano & Alejado 7708, 5 February 2015; date of death, 6 December 2015, from the acknowledgments.
Lucañas, C. C. (2016). First Philippine record of the cockroach genus Anaplecta Burmeister 1838, with the description of a new species from Mt. Makiling, Laguna. The Philippine Entomologist 30(1): 11 to 16. Holotype UPLBMNH BLA-00535. Year per a university repository record.
Pelser, Doble, O'Byrne, Ormerod and Barcelona (2016). Gastrodia cajanoae. Phytotaxa 266(1): 53 to 56.
UPLB Museum of Natural History: tribute video to Mary Ann Cajano, and press releases on the herbarium and on Anaplecta anncajanoae.
Next week: Kloppenburg, D. (1990), Hoya burtoniae, The Hoyan; Burton, C. M., P.S. The Hoyan 1(1), 1 October 2002.