Named for: York Meredith, orchid and hoya nurseryman, of Dee Why and Cromer, New South Wales, Australia
Published in: Phytologia 64(4): 304 (1988)
Type collected: Bau, Sarawak, Borneo (July 1980), cultivated on from that material in Hawaii
Type specimen: Holotype at Bishop Museum (BISH), isotypes at BISH and NY, type citation clarified by Rodda (2017)
Status today: Accepted, per IPNI and Kew's Plants of the World Online (2026), a species in its own right, distinct from Hoya vitellinoides and Hoya callistophylla
I grow a hoya named after a man who almost slipped out of the record completely.
If you have Hoya meredithii on your shelves, you know the leaf right away. It is hard, thick, and rigid. On a healthy vine, a single leaf can stretch a foot long, with eight to twelve dark, prominent veins cutting across a pale green blade like a topographical map. Most growers buy it strictly for the foliage. Then, when it finally blooms, they get caught off guard: clusters of pale chartreuse flowers barely a centimeter across, open for four quick days, dripping nectar the entire time, and then gone.
I had mine on my bench for years and never once thought about where that name came from.
Then one day I went looking. I figured he would stay a mystery. He did not.
Start with the plant itself. In 1988, a nurseryman named Ted Green published the species in a four page paper in the journal Phytologia. The byline gives his nursery, Green: Plant Research, and a post office box in Ka'a'awa, Hawaii, which tells you the whole operation ran right out of his home shade houses.
Green explained the name himself, in one sentence.
"This handsomely leaved species is named for York Meredith, the plantsman, of Dee Why, Australia, who discovered it."
A name. A trade. A town.
There is a detail earlier in that same paper worth pausing on. In his formal description, Green notes the vine as loosely, oppositely leaved, sometimes missing the twin of a pair. In hoyas, leaves almost always come in opposite pairs at each node. Noticing that a plant occasionally skips the second leaf of a pair is not something you learn from a single dried herbarium sheet. A pressed plant is one afternoon in a plant's life. To catch that habit, somebody had to grow the vine, water it, and watch it for seasons.
The type specimen backs this up. Green never pressed this plant in Borneo. He collected living cuttings at Bau, in Sarawak, in July of 1980, carried them home to Oahu, raised them in his own greenhouse, and pressed his own cultivated plant a year later. He waited seven years between collecting the vine and publishing the name. He grew it first. He named it second.
Here is where the story almost went sideways, and where I have to correct myself.
Years later, a serious hoya specialist named Christine Burton went back through Green's own sales catalogs, some stretching back to 1982, and argued in the hoya journal The Hoyan that this was not a new species at all. Her case was that Green's plant was really Hoya vitellinoides, a species already named back in 1950. A botanist at Kew, David Goyder, backed up her concerns about the specimen. For a while, the name meredithii sat under real, credentialed doubt.
It did not hold up. Hoya vitellinoides turns out to be a plant of Sumatra and Java, different islands, different soil, nowhere near Borneo. Michele Rodda, the botanist who has done the real work of sorting out Bornean hoya taxonomy, went back to the specimens and in 2017 formally reset the type for Hoya meredithii rather than erasing it. Today, both IPNI and Kew's own Plants of the World Online still list Hoya meredithii as an accepted species, standing on its own, apart from vitellinoides and apart from another plant Green had also confused along the way, Hoya callistophylla. The challenge was real. The name survived it anyway.
I bring this up because an earlier version of this post repeated a specific claim about Burton, a quote about a falling out between York Meredith and a former business partner, that I could not verify anywhere and should never have printed as fact. It is gone from this version. What is true is better anyway: a credentialed challenge to the name, and a name that stood up to it.
Here is what stands out to me about that. Everywhere I read about Christine Burton, she gets described as meticulous, sharp, and rarely if ever wrong. In this one case, by the record we have, she was. I could not find anywhere that she said so herself. That is worth sitting with on its own, and especially right now, with so many long standing hoya names getting pulled apart and reclassified, verticillata, latifolia, and others, as this gets written. Hoya meredithii already went through that fire, a real challenge from a real expert, and it is still standing on its own. That is not nothing.
So the plant's name held. What about the man?
Go looking for York Meredith and the trail does not go cold, it just takes real digging. Newspaper classifieds put him trading personally as an orchid grower in Sydney by 1952, and by 1954 his ads already run under the name York Meredith Nurseries. Over the years that followed, two related companies came and went. Dos Pueblos Orchid Co, operating out of Dee Why and apparently trading on the name and some of the stock of a much larger Californian orchid grower of the same name, closed quietly in 1967. Willandra Orchid Co, working out of the same part of Dee Why, did not close quietly. It was wound up by order of the Supreme Court of New South Wales in 1982, after a creditor's petition. Whatever happened in between, the business trading under Meredith's own name outlasted both companies. A Sydney orchid journal from the late 1990s lists him among members who had belonged to the Orchid Society of New South Wales for fifty years, putting his start around 1949, when he would have been barely out of his teens.
There is one more story, and I want to be honest about how thin the thread is. A Sydney newspaper from September 1944 describes a fifteen year old boy named York Meredith, thrown from his bicycle by a car, telling the ambulance officers, before anything else, to make sure someone looked after his orchids. I cannot prove that boy grew up to be the same man whose name is on this plant. But the age fits, the city fits, and if it is him, he was already an orchid man before he was old enough to vote.
What gets me about this one is fifty years. A man can spend half a century doing one specific, unglamorous thing, orchids in Dee Why, showing up at society meetings, keeping a nursery open through one liquidation and then another, and still very nearly disappear from the record. Not because there was nothing to find. Because nobody had bothered to look hard enough, including me, the first time.
So if you know anything about York Meredith, his nursery at Dee Why or Cromer, an old society newsletter, or a catalogue from the fifties through the nineties, let me know.
I will add it to the permanent record, and I will put your name on it.
Names have roots too. Worth knowing whose.
Roots First. Always.
Phil
Sources & References:
• Green, T. (1988). Hoya meredithii T.Green. Phytologia, 64(4): 304.
• Rodda, M. (2017). Index of names and types of Hoya (Apocynaceae: Asclepiadoideae) of Borneo. Gardens' Bulletin Singapore, 69(1): 33 to 65.
• Lamb, A. & Rodda, M. (2016). A Guide to Hoyas of Borneo.
• International Plant Names Index (IPNI): urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:934574-1
• Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew: Plants of the World Online (POWO)
• Australian Orchid Review, back issues (archive.org), for York Meredith Nurseries advertisements
• NSW Government Gazette and Commonwealth of Australia Gazette notices (Trove, National Library of Australia), for Dos Pueblos Orchid Co. and Willandra Orchid Co. liquidation records
• Sydney Morning Herald, 18 September 1944, "Injured Boy's Courage" (Trove)