Companion post to Names Have Roots, Episode 4
Quick question. Whose name are you saying when you say hoya?
You say it every day. Hoya carnosa, hoya kerrii, whatever just showed up on your porch. It is one of the most spoken words in this hobby. And before it was a plant's name, it was a man's name.
His name was Thomas Hoy. He was a gardener. And for a man whose name is said in greenhouses on every continent, we know almost nothing about him.
The index card
What we can say for sure about Thomas Hoy fits on an index card. Born around 1750, somewhere. Died May 1, 1822, at Isleworth, aged seventy-two. For about forty years he was the gardener at Syon House, the country seat of the Dukes of Northumberland on the Thames in west London. Forty years means he served three dukes.
In 1788 he was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London. That was the society's founding year. A working gardener, voted into the oldest biological society on earth in the year it was born. A dictionary of British botanists calls him "an experienced botanist and able cultivator." That is nearly the whole biography. Everything else we build from the world around him.
The life
Picture Syon House in the 1780s. Two hundred acres of park along the Thames, landscaped by Capability Brown himself. A gardener there lived by a clock the family never saw. Up before dawn. First job, the hothouse stoves, banked up overnight. If a fire had gone out in the night, the tropical plants inside were dying in the cold.
The earliest trace of Hoy in his own words is a letter dated December 9, 1785. The Society for the Encouragement of Arts had sent Chinese hemp and flax seed home on East India Company ships, and the Duke directed that it be tried in his gardens. Hoy ran it like a scientist. Three trials: some in a hotbed, some under glass without bottom heat, some in the natural ground. He recorded it all. The plants grew twelve to fourteen feet tall.
And here is a detail worth sitting with. Syon House stands directly across the Thames from Kew Gardens. For forty years, Thomas Hoy worked within sight of the greatest botanical garden in the world. Joseph Banks, the most powerful man in British science, was just across the water. Hoy was not on the edge of the botanical world. He was across the river from its center, growing the plants they were all talking about.
The credits back that up. The great Hortus Kewensis catalog records plants "cultivated by Mr. Thomas Hoy": Banksia robur in 1802, sweet-scented acacia before 1790, myrtle-leaved acacia about 1789. When a seed survived a six-month voyage from Australia in a ship's hold, past the rats and the salt air, it was the gardener at Syon who decided whether it lived.
The naming
In 1810, the botanist Robert Brown published the genus Hoya and named it for Thomas Hoy. Brown's Latin dedication calls him an experienced botanist and skilled cultivator of plants.
Why Hoy? Here is the honest answer, and it is the heart of the episode. Brown built the genus on living plants. He had seen them alive in tropical Australia and in English glasshouses. And the man in England who knew living exotic plants better than almost anyone was the gardener across the river from Kew. Brown named the genus for the cultivator.
The monument
The Second Duke of Northumberland, Hoy's employer for most of those forty years, got an eighty-three-foot stone column from his grateful tenants. It still stands outside Alnwick.
Hoy got a stone too, or did once. In 1840, a visitor to the Isleworth churchyard copied its inscription: "Mr. Thomas Hoy, 40 years gardener to the Duke of Northumberland, died May 1, 1822, aged 72." Whether that stone still stands, nobody seems to know. The tenants remembered their duke in stone. The botanists remembered their gardener in Latin. The Latin is everywhere.
A species epithet is a thank-you note. A genus is a monument.
Hear the full story in Names Have Roots, Episode 4: Thomas Hoy, Where Hoya Took Root. New episodes every Tuesday.