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Names Have Roots: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Phil Achleman
Hundreds of hoyas carry a person's name. A collector, a botanist, a grower in a beach suburb who found something nobody had seen. Others carry nothing but a number and three letters that nobody can account for anymore. The people behind both are mostly gone, and mostly unrecorded. Phil Achleman grows hoyas in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Each episode takes one species name apart and follows it back to the person underneath it, through the original description, the herbarium sheet, the obituary. Sometimes the record holds. Sometimes it falls apart in your hands, and that turns out to be the more interesting story.
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- 1 weeks ago9 min
Ann Wayman: The Heart of the Association
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.
- 1 weeks ago29 min
Names Have Roots Special Edition: Nathalie Simonsson
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.
- 2 weeks ago32 min
Christine Burton: An Unfinished Portrait
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
- 3 weeks ago14 min
Hoya anncajanoae; The Roots Ate Ana Left Behind
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.
- 4 weeks ago31 min
Thomas Hoy, Where Hoya Took Root
The man whose name you say every day. Before hoya was a plant, it was 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. 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.
- Sep 29, 202630 min
Hoya kerrii: The Roots He Couldn't Leave
Hey! I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a voice note.Most people know Hoya kerrii as the heart-shaped plant sold around Valentine’s Day. Behind that familiar leaf is the remarkable story of Arthur Francis George Kerr—an Irish doctor whose life became deeply rooted in Siam, now Thailand.In this episode, 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. Along the way, we explore Kerr’s work as a physician, botanist, husband, father, wartime veteran and chronicler of Thailand’s extraordinary plant life.The surviving specimen, diaries and botanical records reveal much of Kerr’s life—but leave one important moment frustratingly undocumented.Next episode: the gardener whose name became an entire genus—Thomas Hoy.Names Have Roots Every Hoya has a name. Every name has a story. Let’s find the next one.
- Sep 22, 202618 min
Hoya clemensiorum: The Rooted Wanderers
Hey! I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a voice note.Hoya clemensiorum is named for 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 at gatheringmoss.shop/blogs/hoya-names/hoya-clemensiorum-the-rooted-wanderers
- Sep 16, 20262 min
Prologue
Hey! I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a voice note.Why am I doing this?
About Names Have Roots
Hundreds of hoyas carry a person's name. A collector, a botanist, a grower in a beach suburb who found something nobody had seen. Others carry nothing but a number and three letters that nobody can account for anymore. The people behind both are mostly gone, and mostly unrecorded. Phil Achleman grows hoyas in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Each episode takes one species name apart and follows it back to the person underneath it, through the original description, the herbarium sheet, the obituary. Sometimes the record holds. Sometimes it falls apart in your hands, and that turns out to be the more interesting story.
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