Names Have Roots

On July 7, 2000, a botanist named Ruth Kiew was collecting plants on a limestone hill called Bukit Baturong in Sabah. One of the plants she collected that day was a small hoya. Her specimen, RK5029, went into the Singapore Herbarium. Fifteen years later, Michele Rodda published that hoya as a new species and named it Hoya ruthiae, in her honor. The woman he was honoring was the same woman who had collected the plant in the first place. She had collected her own name.This episode is hers. Ruth was born Ruth Evans in Cambridge in 1946, the daughter of two botanists, in a house where her mother had been held back by the limits Cambridge placed on women. Ruth came to Malaysia in 1969 on a scholarship, planning one year of fieldwork for her doctorate. She stayed fifty six years, became a Malaysian citizen, and gave her life to the small plants of the Malaysian forest, the begonias, the gesneriads, and above all the plants of the limestone hills. The accounts of her career credit her with describing roughly one hundred and fifty species, and a study of the plant name index at Kew counted one hundred and sixty six new species under her name. In 2002 she became the first woman ever to receive the David Fairchild Medal for plant exploration. From 1997 to 2005 she was Keeper of the Herbarium at the Singapore Botanic Gardens. Singapore would later call her the Queen of Begonias.And the plant itself rewards a close look. Hoya ruthiae runs with clear sap where most hoyas run white. Its flowers are white with a pink tint, over a fleshy yellow corona with a purple center. In the wild it is known only from that one limestone hill, and its conservation status sits at Data Deficient because so little about its wild population is known, even while growers around the world keep it on their shelves, many of them under its old label, Hoya species UT 168.Ruth died in Malaysia in 2025. Her name now sits on a hoya, on a begonia, on a whole genus called Kiewia, and on one more limestone plant published in her memory in 2026. Next time on this show, the man who gave Ruth Kiew her hoya gets his own story. His name is Michele Rodda.Names Have Roots releases every Tuesday. Every hoya has a name. Every name has a story. Let us find the next one.

In the spring of 1995, the hoya world ran through a house in Central Point, Oregon. Ann Wayman edited Fraterna, the quarterly bulletin of the International Hoya Association. She was also its secretary and its treasurer, and the association office was her own home. Seven people met in her living room at the start. The membership grew close to two hundred.

This episode is hers. The seller who closed her greenhouse in 1987. The editor who printed a correction of her own mistake in the very issue that honored her. The grower whose advice Kloppenburg quoted in The World of Hoyas as an authority, and who flowered the plant at Central Point that became a type specimen. And the plant itself, Hoya waymaniae, deep orange, still in the trade today as Kapuas and Cloudy Sky, so distinctive that Kloppenburg wrote it could be separated from every other hoya by its pollinarium alone.

Her last firsthand writing is from 2011, and after that the public record simply stops. Phil tells the ending the only honest way he can, with the thread showing.

The episode closes with the October memorial segment heard all this month, remembering Phil's mom and asking listeners due for a mammogram not to put it off.

Names Have Roots releases every Tuesday. Every hoya has a name. Every name has a story. Let us find the next one.

A note on the names in this episode.

I am a plant grower from Indiana. Some of the names in this episode are Swedish, some are Papuan, and I know I did not say all of them the way the people who own them do. That is on me and my accent, never a lack of respect, least of all for the woman this episode honors. If I got your name wrong, I am sorry, and I would rather be corrected than let it stand.

Nathalie Simonsson has spent her life in the field, in New Guinea and beyond, finding hoyas nobody had ever described and giving them their names. Forty three of them carry her as their author. She named a whole genus, Papuahoya. With Michele Rodda she wrote the field guide to the hoyas of New Guinea. This is her story, told from her own record: the expeditions, the species, the cultivar named for her, and the grower in Hawaii, Carol Noel, whose hands helped bring that cultivar into the world.

She edited the hoya world's journal for twenty three years. Botanists trusted her with the record of an entire genus. A species carries her name to this day. And there is not one confirmed photograph of her anywhere we can find.

This is the story of Christine Burton and Hoya burtoniae, the velvet leaf hoya.

In 1979 Burton founded the Hoya Society International in Georgia and became editor of its journal, The Hoyan. For more than two decades, if you grew hoyas and wanted to know what you actually had, her pages were where the answers lived.

Then the society split in two. Her journal ended. And Burton herself began slipping out of the record she had worked so hard to keep. No reliable obituary. A book that may or may not exist. Most issues of The Hoyan almost impossible to find. Growers still meet her plant tangled up with Hoya tsangii and DS 70 on labels today.

So we went looking, through society records and surviving journal issues, to the 1990 day Dale Kloppenburg named Hoya burtoniae in her honor. What is documented, what is only reported, and where the trail honestly ends.

The episode closes with a personal October memory: Phil remembers his mother, Diane.

Names Have Roots tells the stories of the people behind hoya names, every Tuesday. Follow the show so the next name finds you. This Friday, October 23, brings a special episode, the first one about someone who is still living.

Growing Hoya burtoniae at home? Tell me what yours is doing this fall.

0:00 The specimen that waited eighty years

· 2:27 Christine Burton: An Unfinished Portrait

· 2:48 A hoya sold as globulosa · 4:30 February 12, 1979: a society is born

· 7:05 More than an editor

· 14:55 The split

· 18:49 The journal ends, the writing moves online · 22:55 The journal that vanished

· 25:53 The name that stayed in the record

· 31:10 A word for October

· 31:37 Every name has a story

Grower sites say Hoya anncajanoae smells like caramel and drips nectar. This episode is about the woman inside that long name. Mary Ann Cajano, known as Ana, was a herbarium technician at the University of the Philippines Los Baños who looked after more than seventy thousand specimens. Four living things were named for her: two hoyas, an orchid, and a cockroach. Phil follows her paper trail from a Rafflesia description in 2006, through the Laguna hillside collection that became the type specimen in November of 2006, to the orchid whose authors wrote that she passed away on the morning of its discovery.

One word in the title trips people up. Ate is pronounced AH teh. It is not the past tense of eat. In the Philippines it is what you call an older sister, as a mark of respect.

Names Have Roots releases every Tuesday. Every hoya has a name. Every name has a story. Let's find the next one.

Who is hoya named after? Thomas Hoy, a working gardener at Syon House who served three Dukes of Northumberland across forty years. In 1810, botanist Robert Brown named an entire genus for him.

The man whose name you say every day. This week: the gardener's life in the 1780s, the great estate across the river from Kew, and why Brown gave the genus to the cultivator. A species epithet is a thank you note. A genus is a monument.

Names Have Roots tells the stories behind hoya names. New episodes every Tuesday.

Who was Hoya kerrii named after? Arthur Francis George Kerr, an Irish doctor whose life became deeply rooted in Siam, now Thailand.

Most people know Hoya kerrii as the heart leaf plant sold around Valentine's Day. Behind that familiar leaf: Phil follows Kerr from Trinity College Dublin to Chiang Mai and Doi Suthep, where he collected the specimen that William Grant Craib later described as Hoya kerrii. Physician, botanist, husband, father, wartime veteran. And one important moment the records leave frustratingly undocumented.

Who was Hoya clemensiorum named after? Two people, not one. Joseph Clemens was an Army chaplain who followed his wife Mary into the field, from Hawaii to the Philippines to China to British North Borneo.

When he died on a jungle trail in New Guinea in 1936, Mary wrote it down on a herbarium label and kept collecting alone, adding roughly fourteen thousand more specimens before she was done. This episode is their story, and how a hoya lost its name and got it back.

Full writeup: https://gatheringmoss.shop/blogs/hoya-names/hoya-clemensiorum-the-rooted-wanderers

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Why am I doing this?

Who was Hoya meredithii named after? York Meredith, a plantsman of Dee Why, New South Wales. And there is a real, credentialed challenge to the plant's own name that it stood up to.

Updated September 2026: an earlier version of this episode included a quote I could not verify. It has been corrected, and the audio above is the fixed version. The plant's story turned out to be better than the first draft anyway.

Full written version, with sources: https://gatheringmoss.shop/blogs/hoya-names/the-plantsman-of-dee-why