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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 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

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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 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

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Why am I doing this?