This blog has been quiet for a while. Longer than I'd like to admit — the last real run of posts was the winter of 2023 into 2024.
The honest reason is that I was busy growing plants and running a business, and writing was the thing that fell off the list.
The less comfortable reason is that I didn't much like what I was writing.
Go back and read those old posts. Most of them are care guides. Light, water, humidity, repot in spring. All true. All fine. All completely interchangeable with what every other plant account is putting out this week.
I'm tired of reading those. I suspect you are too.
What This Is Going To Be Instead
Three things.
The science under the soil. This part stays, because it's what I actually know. Root physiology, substrate structure, oxygen exchange at the root surface, and why watering rhythm matters more than whatever mix recipe people are arguing about this month. I'll keep having those arguments.
The names. Every hoya you own has a name, and a lot of those names belong to people. Real people, with expeditions and falling-outs and — in one case I'll get to — an amputation. Nobody ever tells you who they were. I'm going to.
The institutions. Where plant names come from, who decides them, and what a place like Kew actually does. You have used Kew's work without knowing it, every single time you've checked whether a hoya name is real.
Some of it will annoy people. Good. That's a conversation, and I'd rather have one of those than write another post about bright indirect light.
Start With The Obvious One
Here's something I'd bet most hoya collectors have never been told.
The genus is named after a gardener.
Not a botanist. Not an explorer. Not an aristocrat with a glasshouse and a budget. Thomas Hoy was the head gardener at Syon House in Middlesex, working for the Duke of Northumberland, and he held that job for roughly forty years.
He was good enough at it that the Linnean Society made him a fellow in 1788. He sent them flowering plants he'd grown, and several species got their formal scientific descriptions off the back of what came out of his glasshouses.
In 1810, Robert Brown named the entire genus after him. Brown's stated reason was that Hoy's "merits as an intelligent and successful cultivator have been long known to the botanists of this country."
An intelligent and successful cultivator.
That's the whole justification. Brown wasn't honouring someone who hacked through a jungle and found the thing. He named it after a man who was good at growing.
I think about that more than I probably should. Two hundred years on, in a hobby that gets very worked up about who found what and who's holding the rarest cutting, the name on the entire genus belongs to a working gardener whose claim to fame was simply that plants did well under his care.
Hoy died in 1822 at Isleworth, a couple of miles up the Thames from Kew. He'd spent four decades in the same glasshouses. As far as I can tell he never went anywhere exotic, never wrote a famous book, and never had a plant named after him for anything other than being excellent at the unglamorous part.
That'll do as a place to start.
Roots First. Always.
— Phil