ABOUT THIS PODCAST 🔗
Every hoya is named for a real person. Each week, Phil Achleman tells the story behind the name: the collectors, botanists, gardeners, and obsessives whose lives got attached to a plant. Hoya kerrii, Hoya clemensiorum, Hoya meredithii, and the gardener whose name became the entire genus.
A houseplant podcast from Gathering Moss. New episodes every Tuesday.
A houseplant podcast from Gathering Moss. New episodes every Tuesday.
Update frequency:
weekly
Average audio length:
18 minutes
English
United States
6 episodes
since Sept. 16, 2026
episodic
IN THIS PODCAST 🔗
LATEST EPISODE 🔗
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 …
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PREVIOUS EPISODES 🔗
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…
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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 th…
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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…
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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 mer…
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Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Phil Achleman, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
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