The Plantsman of Dee Why

I grow a hoya named after a man nobody can find.

That's Hoya meredithii. You know the leaf if you have one. Hard, rigid, a foot long on a good vine, with eight to twelve dark veins running across a lighter blade. People buy it for the foliage and then get caught off guard when it blooms. Pale chartreuse, a centimeter across, four days and done, dripping nectar the whole time.

I've had mine a while and I never once thought about the name. Then one day I did. And I couldn't find him.

Start with the easy part, because the easy part is easy.

The species was published in 1988 by a man named Ted Green, out of Kaaawa, Hawaii. The paper is four pages in a journal called Phytologia. The byline gives his nursery and a post office box, which tells you the operation ran out of his house.

Green explains 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. Dee Why is a beach suburb north of Sydney.

That should have been the whole story. Go look for York Meredith and you'll see why it isn't.

Before I get to that, I want to show you something in that same paper, because it changes how you read everything after it.

Green describes the plant as "loosely, oppositely leaved (sometimes lacking the twin of a pair)."

Read that again. He's saying the leaves usually come in pairs, but sometimes one just doesn't show up.

You cannot learn that from a dried specimen. A pressed plant is one afternoon in one plant's life. To know that the pairs sometimes come up short, somebody had to watch the thing for years.

The rest of the paper is the same. Four-day flowers. The fragrance. The nectar. That's not a botanist with a magnifying glass. That's a grower.

And the type specimen proves it. Green never pressed a plant in Borneo. He pressed one of his own, in Hawaii, in 1981, grown on from material collected at Bau, Sarawak, in July of 1980. Seven years between the collection and the paper. He raised it first. He named it second.

I trust a description more when the man who wrote it grew the plant.

Now the part that comes apart.

In 2005, a woman named Christine Burton wrote about this plant in a hoya journal called The Hoyan. She knew Green. She also fought with him in public about hoya names, which you should keep in mind.

She wrote: "Ted claims to have gotten it from York Meredith."

Then she went further. She said she'd written back and forth for years with Meredith's old business partner. And that the partner had walked away from Meredith's business because Meredith "simply refused to or was unable to keep any kind of accurate records."

Her conclusion was blunt. "It seems likely that York Meredith didn't have a clue where he got that plant."

Take that with a grain of salt. She was in a fight with Green when she wrote it, and she wasn't there. She heard it from the partner and wrote down what he told her. That's not proof.

It's also the only thing anybody has.

So you've got Green on one side and Burton on the other, and they don't agree.

Green's paper gives a locality, an elevation of 35 meters, a soil type, a habitat and a month. Bau is limestone country and he wrote down calcareous soils. That is not a man being vague. That is a man who believed he knew exactly where his plant came from.

Burton says the man who handed it to him did not.

Both of those are in print, from people who were alive at the time and had names. I don't think anybody settles it now.

But look at what it means either way. The reason you can't find York Meredith is that he was a man who didn't leave anything behind. No records. His own partner quit over it. A plant is going to carry his name for as long as the species stands, and the paperwork underneath it may be worth nothing at all.

Here's the part that actually bothers me.

Ted Green died on July 21st, 2022. He was a hundred years old.

He was a Navy man before he was a plant man. His ship went down off Vella Lavella in 1943 and he came home with the Navy and Marine Corps Medal, which is the one they give you for saving lives rather than taking them. Then he spent the next eighty years on the plants of the ocean that nearly killed him. He published his last new species in March of 2021, at ninety-nine years old.

He named meredithii in 1988. That's thirty-four years he was alive and findable afterward.

For thirty-four years, anybody could have called him and asked who York Meredith was.

Nobody did. Or somebody did and didn't write it down, which amounts to the same thing.

What gets me about this one is those thirty-four years.

I'm a history guy. Mostly the Second World War, which is how I ended up in a hundred-year-old man's obituary hunting for the name of his ship. But it's the same instinct either way, and here is what I think it comes down to.

The big history takes care of itself. Pearl Harbor will get written about forever. What doesn't get written about is the small stuff that only one or two people ever knew, and that goes in the ground with them. Nobody comes along later to save it. It gets recorded because somebody bothered, or it doesn't get recorded at all.

Whether it's a paragraph or a book, you're still recording something. That counts for something.

And there are people right now who know things nobody has written down. The grower who knows where a clone really came from. The one who remembers who handed it over, and why. It isn't written anywhere. It's all one obituary away from gone.

So if you know anything about York Meredith, a nursery at Dee Why, a catalogue, a name in some society bulletin from the seventies or eighties, tell me. I'll add it here and put your name on it.

Names have roots too. Worth knowing whose.

Roots First. Always.

Phil

Sources: T. Green, "A new species of Hoya (Asclepiadaceae) from Sarawak," Phytologia 64(4): 303-305, 1988, scanned at the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Christine Burton, The Hoyan vol. 4 no. 1, January 2005. "Index of names and types of Hoya (Apocynaceae) of Borneo," Gardens' Bulletin Singapore 69(1), 2017. Honolulu Star-Advertiser obituary, 28 August 2022.