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. Twenty years of joint work followed.
She was the field half of that partnership. He was the desk half. She supplied most of the field material, the collections and the observations. He compiled and verified. Growers who only know the names on their labels are seeing the end of a very long chain that started in the forest.
The field years
Rodda has told the story this way. Simonsson first traveled to Papua New Guinea in 2008 and moved there in 2010. She was based at Ukarumpa in the Eastern Highlands, and her papers carry the affiliation of research affiliate at the National Research Institute of Papua New Guinea.
By December 2015 her field program had run fifty five expeditions in eleven provinces. The program gathered data on more than four thousand Hoya individuals, and about fifteen hundred specimens were brought into cultivation. Type material from the program rests at the herbarium in Lae, with duplicates in Singapore.
Her first published name was Hoya platycaulis, published with Rodda in 2009. Names from Vietnam, Thailand, Borneo and the Philippines followed, as well as names from New Guinea. One name stands apart from all the rest. Impatiens evelinae, published in 2012, is the one name in her whole bibliography that she carries entirely alone, and it is also her one name outside Hoya.
The Papuasia papers and a genus of her own
In 2017 the first part of the Papuasia revision appeared in Gardens Bulletin Singapore. It held ten new species, one new subspecies and one new combination. The second part arrived in Blumea in 2022, with eight new species and one new subspecies.
Then came the step that very few living botanists ever get to take. In 2020, Rodda and Simonsson and their colleagues published a study of the Hoya group in Willdenowia. The study described a three species group, sister to the rest of Hoya, as a new genus. They named it Papuahoya.
Two of the Papuahoya species were new. The third was a transfer, Papuahoya urniflora, a plant whose name Simonsson herself had already moved once before, from Marsdenia into Hoya in 2017. She has made two of the three names that plant has carried in its life.
A record that has not been touched
On the morning this episode went live, I had every one of her forty three names checked again against Plants of the World Online at Kew and against the International Plant Names Index. The result surprised even me.
Forty one of the names stand today exactly as published. None of her species has been sunk into another name by any other botanist. None has been renamed by anyone else. The only two changes in the whole record were made by Simonsson and Rodda themselves. One is the urniflora transfer into Papuahoya. The other is a spelling correction they published in 2022, changing Hoya stenakei to Hoya stenaokei, because the plant honors Sten Åke Svensson and the Swedish letter in his name deserved to be written right. The databases still carry the first spelling, so print and the databases disagree, and I am leaving that disagreement exactly as I found it.
New species get challenged all the time. Hers have not been. That is what careful fieldwork looks like when the whole field gets its chance to argue.
The guide to the hoyas of New Guinea
In June 2026 the work reached the shelf. A Guide to Hoya of New Guinea, by Nathalie Simonsson and Michele Rodda, was officially launched on 26 June 2026 in Kota Kinabalu. The publisher is Natural History Publications, Borneo. The book runs to 232 pages and covers 72 taxa, 67 species and five subspecies, across four elevation bands from the coast to 2600 metres. Most of those taxa are found nowhere else on earth.
Rodda has written that without her fieldwork and collections, the book would never have been possible. He visited New Guinea once, in 2017. She lived the field years that made the guide.
The cultivar named for her
There is also a plant that carries her first name into ordinary greenhouses. Hoya 'Nathalie' is a hybrid raised by Mike Bernardo, from Hoya erythrostemma crossed with Hoya Joy. Its breeder code is MB1268. The register entry in STEMMA gives the nominant and introducer as Carol Noel, a grower in Hawaii, and its etymology line is plain and complete. Named for Nathalie Simonsson.
Its sister plant in the same breeder's book is MB1255, Hoya 'Michele', named for Rodda. The trade often adds an extra letter and writes Michelle. The two collaborators each got a plant, close together in the same book, and half the trade spells his wrong.
The part of her life the plant world rarely hears
The fieldwork in Papua New Guinea was only one of her callings there. Simonsson worked as a linguist with the SIL Global Sign Languages Team. With her husband Foreting Juhonewe and a team of Deaf educators, she helped build a dictionary of Papua New Guinean Sign Language. More than 3800 signs were collected for that dictionary. The same effort produced sign language books to help hearing parents communicate with their Deaf children.
In May 2015 Papua New Guinean Sign Language was made the fourth official language of Papua New Guinea. SIL describes Simonsson as a Deaf linguist on its Global Sign Languages Team. That fact sits at the end of the episode, and it sits near the end here too, because everything before it is the record she built, and the record comes first.
Listen and tell me what you think
The Names Have Roots special on Nathalie Simonsson is live now on Spotify. If you grow one of her species, or you hold a memory of her work that belongs in the record, I want to hear it. Corrections are welcome too. Every hoya has a name. Every name has a story. Hers might be the best one I have told yet.
Phil Achleman
Names Have Roots