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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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