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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 ago30 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.
- 2 weeks ago18 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
- 2 weeks ago2 min
Prologue
Hey! I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a voice note.Why am I doing this?
- 2 weeks ago9 min
Hoya Meredithii: Roots of Controversy
Hey! I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a voice note.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.Hoya meredithii was named in 1988 for York Meredith, a plantsman of Dee Why, New South Wales. Nobody had ever pulled together his full story before, and there is a real, credentialed challenge to the plant's own name that it stood up to.Full written version, with sources: https://gatheringmoss.shop/blogs/hoya-names/the-plantsman-of-dee-why
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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