This beautiful plant may still be the most cultivated species of Hoya, 174 years after it was first collected by a European. Since the naming of the genus Hoya more than a hundred Hoya species have been made available for the amateur grower, out of 520 species now known. Other species of Hoya may be more spectacular but this one is beautiful, delightfully fragrant, compact and relatively easy to grow.
General description
The individual flowers are about 1.8cm (just under ¾ inch) in diameter. The fragrance is particularly strong during the evening.
It has a similarity to the jasmine-like fragrance of Stephanotis, though with nuances and without the jasmine notes. I think those nuances of the odour are like the flowers of common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) or the flowers of saffron crocus (Crocus sativus). It also reminds me of Daphne odora. I know those comparisons are not going to be helpful to the majority of houseplant owners.
Some descriptions liken the fragrance to vanilla. I can't smell that, though it is very much the sort of sweet fragrance that would be delicious in ice cream or chocolate. Though some parts of Hoya bella are likely to be toxic, as are many of the other Hoya species.
I have not found any analyses of the fragrance and no vendor selling the essential oil of Hoya bella. There may be some varieties with different amounts or type of fragrance. Mine is not strong, you have to get close to the flower to smell except on a very warm evening.
Hoya bella has occasionally been grafted onto rootstock of larger Hoyas to produce a larger, stronger plant since 1857. However, most people appreciate the fact that this plant is small enough to fit in an ordinary house or office.
It is very easy to multiply by cuttings. The new plants can flower within a year, if treated well. They are best with multiple plants in one hanging basket. They want light but not too much. Best hung near a window but out of direct sunlight.
Hoya bella prefers humid, warm conditions with constant moisture at the roots. Though, if it gets cold you do not want the roots to be too wet. In its native habitat, Hoya bella is an epiphyte. An epiphyte lives on top of other plants. It is not a parasite. It takes no nourishment from the plant it lives on, only support. Hoya bella grows with its roots tucked into pockets of composted vegetable matter lodged into the nooks and crannies of old tree branches.
First European encounter
The First Anglo-Burmese War lasted from 1824 to 1826. The British spent an immense amount of money and 15,000 lives of their European and Indian soldiers. It was the most expensive war the British Indian Imperial government had fought. Defeat forced the Burmese to cede some of their territories to the British and to sign a trade treaty. In 1826, Mawlamyine was made the first capital of British Burma. At the time, there were a lot of different spellings of that city - Moulmein, Moulmain, Maulmein, etc.
Cornish botanist Thomas Lobb was travelling as a plant collector on behalf of Messrs. Veitch & Sons of Exeter. Thomas collected exotic plants from 1843 to 1860. Thomas was following in the path of his brother, William Lobb. Both had trained as practical gardeners. William collected from all over the Americas, from 1840 to 1857. Thomas went east, to India and south-east Asia.
The Veitch nursery was among the largest and most prestigious in Britain. In 1853 they took over the famous nursery of Knight's on King's Road in Chelsea, London and became the Exeter and Chelsea Exotic Nurseries.
In 1848, William Jackson Hooker reported that Thomas Lobb had collected Hoya bella from Kola Mountain in Burma (now called Myanmar), while visiting Mawlamyine.
I can't find exact dates for Thomas Lobb's first plant-collecting visit to Mawlamyine. He does seem to have been there in 1846²⁴ and 1847.³⁸ ⁵⁵ He seems to have returned several more times in later years, including 1850 and 1857.²⁴ It was a useful stopover on the way between north-east India and his other favoured plant-collecting areas in Malaya, Java, Singapore and the Philippines. It was also very rich in new species and particularly Dendrobium orchids.⁵⁵
I can't find any reference online to the present location of Kola Mountain. Online maps of Myanmar are not very helpful, with fewer details than you might find in maps of less troubled nations. It does not help that transliteration of words from Burmese to English script has changed a lot in the last few centuries. It is also possible that Lobb was not always helpful about the exact origins of the plants he collected. The locations were commercially sensitive for his employers, of course.
Don't be lulled into thinking that this was some genteel loner, picking the occasional unusual species out of an untouched forest. Joseph Dalton Hooker recorded the devastation of the forests of the Khasi Hills in north-east India by teams of plant collectors in a letter to his father on the 25th of August 1850.⁴⁹
What with Jenkins & Simons collectors here --- 20 or 30 of Falconers, Lobb's, my friends L[ieutenan]ts Raban & Cave & Inglis friends, the roads are all becoming stripped like the Penang jungles & I assure you for miles it sometimes looks as if a gale had strewed the road with rotten branches & Orchideae. Falconer's men sent down 1000 baskets the other day & assuming 150 at the outside as the number of species worth cultivating it stands to reason that your stoves in England will still be stocked. The only chance of novelty is in the deadly jungles of Assam Jyntea & the Garrows [Garos]. I am therefore not spending my money on Orchideae collecting but rather on Palms, Scitamineae &c which are more difficult to procure & not sought after by these plunderers.
The
Empire was conquered in order to get profit from those lands and
peoples. They strip-mined the minerals, timber, dyes, spices, medicines,
ornamental plants, agricultural produce, art, knowledge and labour.
Lobb reported that he found the tree Saraca lobbiana of the bean family at the foot of Mount Kola. He also found the rather spectacular little ericaceous epiphyte Thibaudia macrantha (now called Agapetes macrantha) on Kola Mountain. He found the plants now called Agapetes bracteata and Agapetes lobbii on another mountain near Mawlamyine called Thoung-gyun (Taung Gyun?). Lobb collected many other plants around Mawlamyine including three species of Begonia, a Lobelia and an Impatiens. The herbarium specimens can be seen on the Kew Herbarium website.¹¹
Can we even trust Thomas Lobb's report that Hoya bella was found near Mawlamyine? In 1915, Edwin D Merrill came to the conclusion that, at least for the collections from Borneo, Java, Luzon and Singapore, it was not wise to trust the labels on Lobb's specimens.⁴³
The mixture of labels in Lobb’s collection can be explained only on the assumption that it was deliberate in order to obscure the regions from which he may have secured valuable commercial orchids; this statement does not necessarily infer that Lobb himself was responsible for the mixture. It has been assumed that the set of Lobb’s plants deposited in the Kew herbarium are correctly labeled, but this is certainly not the case.
Merrill was a specialist in the Philippine flora and was sure that some of Lobb's specimens were labelled Luzon for plants that could not have come from the Philippines. Others were labelled as from Java or Singapore but were certainly from Luzon. There were other problematic herbarium specimens from other collectors such as Hugh Cuming, commemorated in the name of Hoya cumingiana. Merrill eliminated 75 species from the flora of the Philippines because of this investigation. However, this was dwarfed by the 2,400 species eliminated due to their misidentification.
A search of the Myanmar Wikipedia
shows many villages called Taung Kalay or Taung Kale. Without any
supporting evidence from Lobb, it looks like it is now impossible to
locate that mountain. If it was even in the right country. So you won't be missing anything if you skip the pointless speculation I am about to indulge and start again at the next chapter heading: Distribution.
One of the obvious possibilities for Taung Kola or Kola Mountain may be the Kalwi hill. This small hill of about 2½ km by 1 km (1½ by ⅝ miles) is at the north end of Bilu Kyun (Burmese for "ogre island") in the estuary of the Salween River, about 9 km (5⅝ miles) west from Mawlamyine. The towns of Kalwi and Munaing are on the flanks of the hill. I can't find an altitude for the peak of the hill, but it does not look very steep. The Google Maps contour lines appear to suggest it is between 60 and 80m high, tiny compared to many other hills in Myanmar. From the satellite image on Google Maps, the hill still looks well-covered in trees.
The British Burma Gazetteer of 1879 described⁷ the village:
KA-LWEE.—A village in the circle of the same name in the Amherst [Kyaikkhami] district in the extreme north of Bhee-loo-gywon [Bilu Kyun] on the bank of the Daray-bouk or northern mouth of the Salween, lying on the side of a detached hill connected with the main Bhee-loo-gywon range by a road across the rice plain. In 1860 it had 931 inhabitants and 1,138 in 1876. The neighbouring picturesquely situated pagodas and zayat, embosomed amongst trees and overlooking the Salween river, are a favourite resort of the European inhabitants of Maulmain.
Also on Bilu Kyun, there is another small hill about 9km (6 miles) southwest of Kalwi. It is called Kalaw and has a pagoda said to have been founded in the 3rd century BC by Emperor Ashoka.⁷
There is a minority ethnic group of Burmese origin in Cambodia, Laos and Thailand called Kula, Gula or Kola. They are thought to have originated near Mawlamyine, perhaps just to the south. Unfortunately, their origin is mostly forgotten so there is no way to know if they had a favourite mountain in their homeland.
I can't find Thoung-gyun/Taung Gyun, either. There is a Taung Gyun in the far south of Tanintharyi, as far south as you can go in Myanmar. It is nowhere near tall enough - as one of Lobb's collections was from 6,000 feet (1800 m).
Distribution
In 2003, the distribution of Hoya bella within Myanmar was given as Mon and Taninthayi in a checklist of plants of Myanmar.¹² Mon State includes Mawlamyine and follows the coast southwards until it borders Tanintha(r)yi Region. Tanintharyi Region is the southernmost region of Myanmar, a narrow strip between the western coast and Thailand to the east. It is possible the authors were just hedging their bets due to the unsure location of Mount Kola.
The mysterious "Hoya paxtoni" has been said³² to be synonymous with Hoya bella, but that looks very, very unlikely. The origin is also puzzling. That would need another article to itself. I hope someone will test the specimens and determine whether "Hoya paxtoni"is a separate species, before I write about it.
In 1974, Kai Larsen collected two specimens that had been identified as Hoya bella
from Doi Inthanon National Park in Chiang Mai Province in Thailand. Doi
Inthanon National Park is in the far northwest of Thailand, near the
border with Myanmar. This plant was found about 240 km (150 miles)
northeast from Mawlamyine.¹³ These specimens are housed at the Missouri
Botanical Garden and have not yet been digitised and made available
online.
However, the Herbarium of the Muséum national
d'Histoire naturelle, Paris has a duplicate example of one of those two
specimen sheets prepared by Larsen (& Supee S. Larsen).²⁸ Though the
original label does say it is Hoya bella, there is another label stating that in 2009 it was determined to be Hoya engleriana. Hoya engleriana is a similar plant to Hoya bella, though daintier. Hoya engleriana is mentioned by the 2018 Handbook of Asclepiads of Thailand as
being found²⁷ in that part of Northwestern Thailand. Though also known
from Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.⁹ The distinctive shape of the leaves
and the four-flowered pseudo-umbel look right to be Hoya engleriana.
Hoya vaccinioides is another very similar plant that could be mistaken for Hoya bella but is much smaller in all its parts. Hoya vaccinioides is found in Myanmar and Thailand²⁷ according to the Handbook but not according to Kew's Plants of the World Online, which just gives it as occurring in the East Himalayas, Laos and Vietnam. However, the Handbook considers Hoya weebella and Hoya dickasoniana to be synonyms of Hoya vaccinioides and POWO does have those as found only in Thailand and Myanmar, respectively.⁹ Hoya weebella was named because it looked like a small Hoya bella, "wee" as in the Scottish word for small. Not very conventional for a botanical name.
Hoya chinghungensis is another lookalike mentioned by the Handbook as being found²⁷ in that part of Northwestern Thailand, though known before from south Yunnan in China, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam.
Neither Hoya bella nor Hoya lanceolata occur in Thailand according to the Handbook.²⁷
The closely-related Hoya lanceolata has
been reported as found in Nepal, NE India, Myanmar, N Thailand and NW Vietnam.⁴ There has been some
confusion between specimens of Hoya bella and Hoya lanceolata, as well as the other similar species which I mentioned above. So, Hoya lanceolata may have a narrower range than that, perhaps only in Nepal, Bhutan, north Myanmar and northeast India. See the next section for more information on that confusion.
There are herbarium specimens of Hoya lanceolata collected in 1952 (L.2726481, L.2726482, L.2726485
and L.2726488
at the Naturalis Biodiversity Centre) from Cherrapunji and
Pynursla, which have competing determination labels, one saying it is Hoya lanceolata ssp. bella.
The leaves look wrong to me for that to be true. Both are in Meghalaya,
Cherrapunji (or Sohra) is 145 km (90 miles) from the border of Manipur.
Pynursla is 132 km (82 miles) from the border. Others have just Khasi
Hills or Assam as the location. All look like Hoya lanceolata.
The
Kew Gardens Plants of the World Online⁹ has "Assam (Manipur)" in NE
India as another location where the plant has been found but does not
recognise Thailand as a native region. The only references I can find
to specimens of Hoya from Manipur are Hoya edeni, Hoya longifolia, Hoya manipurensis, Hoya pandurata and Hoya polyneura. I would not be surprised if it had several more species, as it is between the hills of Meghalaya and Myanmar.
POWO gives two references for Kew Backbone Distributions for Hoya bella. One just gives Myanmar.¹² The other is the Fascicles of Flora of India by AP Jagtap and NP Singh from 1999.⁶⁴ This is clearly the source for POWO's claim that the plant is also found in Manipur. Not only do the authors give Manipur as a location, they give it as the only location for Hoya bella. They state: "Distrib.: INDIA : Manipur (endemic)."
Endemic for plant distribution means that that species is only found in one area in the wild. Do the authors know something about the real origin of Hoya bella and Thomas Lobb's collections? Probably not, I think it must have just been an error in a huge book. The authors only give two references for their entire entry: WJ Hooker's original description in Curtis's Botanical Magazine⁸ from 1848 and his son's entry in The Flora of British India in 1883.⁶⁵ Both of these give the only origin of Hoya bella as Moulmein in Burma (Mawlamyine in Myanmar). Jagtap and Singh copied the botanical description from Curtis's Botanical Magazine word for word. Their only original content is the statement that the plant is endemic to Manipur. They give no examples of herbarium specimens, collectors or more precise locations. I cannot accept this proves that the plant is found in Manipur, such an extraordinary and unique claim needs support from evidence.
I am inclined to believe that the true Hoya bella only occurred in Myanmar. There may be a subspecies in the northwest of Thailand but we don't yet know if that is a separate species.⁶³
There is now some effort being put into a new Flora of Myanmar. However, the awful political situation has hampered foreign scientific cooperation in Myanmar since the military coup in 1962. UPDATE 2024 - Everything has become much worse in Myanmar after another military coup in 2020 and the subsequent years of full-on civil war.
Taxonomy
The plant Thomas Lobb collected was recognised as a member of the genus Hoya. Hoya had been coined in 1811 by Robert Brown in the same article in which he coined the family Asclepiadeae. Brown wrote that Hoya was named for a gardener called Thomas Hoy "whose merits as an intelligent and successful cultivator, have been long known to the cultivators of this country." Brown only knew of two species at that time, Hoya carnosa and Hoya volubilis.⁵
Hoya carnosa is still known by that name. Kew Gardens introduced the plant to England in 1802, when it was still called Asclepias carnosa. Mrs Barrington of Mongewell, Oxfordshire seems to have obtained a plant at the same time. Hers was the first to flower.²¹
Hoya volubilis was later moved to Dregea and Marsdenia and then became Wattakakka volubilis,¹⁰ from the plant's name Wattakakka-k-koti in the Indian language Malayalam. I am pretty sure botanists chose it just because that name sounds coolest. It has now been moved again and is known as Stephanotis volubilis.²⁹ See the section of my article on Stephanotis that covers the new species added to the genus Stephanotis in 2022.
Hoya bella has been called Hoya lanceolata ssp. bella. Douglas H Kent thought that Hoya bella is a variety of the closely related Hoya lanceolata. In 1981 he published a paper arguing for the name change.³² He used physical appearance to determine the relationships as that was before genetic fingerprinting was feasible and many years before it became commonly used by botanists.
Douglas Kent pointed out in that article that at that time there were no known collections of Hoya bella after that first one by Thomas Lobb. I have not found any reference to another collection from Myanmar in the 40 years since his article was published. Are all cultivated plants of Hoya bella descended from that one collection by Lobb? If so, there appear to be several sports with different variegations - unless they are due to different viral infections. Considering the massive collections that Lobb carried out, hoovering up entire populations - it would be interesting to see how much genetic variation there is within Hoya bella houseplants.
There is a plant being grown by Hoya enthusiasts as Hoya sp. aff. bella "White" PES03. The flowers are very like Hoya bella but with white coronas, no trace of pink or purple. The leaves look very similar to those of Hoya bella. This plant was collected by Dr. Piyakaset Ek Suksathan (hence PES03) of Queen Sirikit Botanic Gardens (Chiang Mai Province) before 2007, probably found in northwest Thailand.⁶³ It does not seem to have been described, classified and published by a botanist yet. It does look very similar so could be a subspecies or variety of Hoya bella but has some differences in the flowers and growth habit so could also be its own species.
There were 33 occurrences under the name Hoya bella on GBIF.
The two photos were clearly Hoya lanceolata from Sikkim. I pointed this out on iNaturalist and they are not on GBIF as Hoya bella anymore. Out of the remaining entries, all herbarium specimens, 16 are recorded explicitly as taken from cultivated specimens. 11
herbarium specimens are from Nepal, Meghalaya and Assam, all clearly
showing the leaf shape of Hoya lanceolata. There is one herbarium sheet that has India as the only information on the origin. There is one specimen that I mentioned above that has been determined as Hoya engleriana. 2 are almost certainly cultivated and are very interesting as they have
the dates 1853 and 1855. These may be the earliest surviving specimens
of Hoya bella in herbaria. I have included the details below, in the last part of the section called Introduction to Britain.
Kent's suggestion that Hoya bella was a subspecies of Hoya lanceolata met with some disagreement from interested parties. In 2007, Mark Randal stated in the online Hoya specialist journal Stemma that the change "is not accepted by the majority of modern experts in the field of hoya taxonomy".³⁶
Recently, there have been genetic comparisons made that showed that Hoya bella and Hoya lanceolata are separate species, with other species more closely related to each. Liede-Schumann et al in 2022 called the group that includes Hoya bella: "Hoya subclade III".²⁹ Huang et al did not name the group. They did name Hoya bella and Hoya lanceolata as distinct species but also found the species they were describing in the articles were members of the same group - Hoya longicalyx in 2020³³ and Hoya pyrifolia in 2021.³⁴
Happily, Kew Gardens now have Hoya bella as the current valid name of the plant on their Plants of the World Online database.⁹ Though the authorities they cite for that from 1999 and 2003 seem weird.¹² ⁶⁴ Neither of the references make any mention of the name change to Hoya lanceolata ssp. bella. or suggest why Hoya bella should be preferred. Both, though published after Kent's publication of Hoya lanceolata ssp. bella. seem to just be reprints of information, from long before his article in the journal Asklepios.³² I expected that it would need a rigorous scientific argument based on plant structure and genetics to show that it is a unique species. It seems it just needed some botanists who were ignorant of the change to publish something afterwards.
Anyway, Liede-Schumann et al are sufficient authority for my amateur musings. I am definitely content to consider it a separate species. Hoya bella has to be the second easiest botanical name to remember for a houseplant - after Aloe vera.
Introduction to Britain
There were 422 plants featured in Curtis's Botanical Magazine that were collected, grown and introduced into trade by the Veitch nursery between 1842 and 1906. These started with Table 3934 (Gloxinia speciosa) and finished with Table 8064 (Lonicera tragophylla). So, they provided an average of more than 6 new introductions per year that were remarkable enough to be included in Curtis's Botanical Magazine. About 10% of the featured new species over 64 years.²⁴
The specific name bella is, of course, a Latin feminine word for beautiful. The same word is still used in modern Italian and Spanish. Veitch first flowered Hoya bella in June 1848. William Jackson Hooker of Kew Botanical Gardens named and described the plant in the 1st of October 1848 edition of Curtis's Botanical Magazine:
The most lovely of all the Hoyas, to which a figure (as in the case of most flowers with much white) is little calculated to do justice. It cannot be called a climber, but the branches are diffuse, copiously leafy, so that the leaves (unlike those in H. carnosa) form a dark back-ground to the delicate umbels of flowers, with leaves in shape resembling those of a Myrtle, and flowers more lively and differently-formed from those of Hoya carnosa, and most deliciously scented. The corolla is a purer white, and the corona a deeper purple: resembling an amethyst set in frosted silver. It is a native of the Taung Kola mountain, Moulmein, and has been imported, through their collector, Mr. Thomas Lobb, by Messrs. Veitch and Sons of Exeter, where treated like an Æschynanthus, or an epiphyte, we had the pleasure of seeing this “ first gem of the air” blossoming in great perfection, in June, 1848. It is a free bloomer, and the flowers last many days in high beauty.
Amethysts are found in Myanmar, where they were regarded as a variety of sapphire. They were called "aubergine flower stone" or "aubergine sapphire". The colour of the flowers of the aubergine or egg-plant vary from pale to dark and may be shades of violet, blue or purple. They often have stripes and markings in different hues and shades on one flower, like the variation within amethyst crystals.¹⁵ Just as Hoya bella has variations in depth of colour through the corona.
The painting above by Walter Hood Fitch is the defining "type" of the species Hoya bella. Nobody thought to take a herbarium specimen for a few years after, it seems.
Another very popular horticultural periodical at the time was Paxton's Magazine of Botany. They sent an artist to Veitch's nursery to draw Hoya bella in August 1848. The plant had been "in bloom for many weeks". When published at the very beginning of 1849, they mentioned the many kinds of Hoya that had been recently discovered - but put Hoya bella above all the known species.⁵³
Our present subject, however, is superior in every point of view, the flowers for delicacy and beauty surpass all the kinds yet known ; the habit of the plant is not climbing, nor does its general growth at all resemble that of H. carnosa ; the branches are slender, numerous, and thickly clothed with small leaves, scarcely so large as those of the broad-leaved Myrtle, and not much unlike them in form. The flowers are not only beautiful individually, but the corymbs are viewed to great advantage, from the circumstance of so large a proportion of green foliage forming a dense back ground ; the petals are of a very pure white, and beautifully frosted ; the central corona of fructification is of a rich carmine purple, and forms a very striking and lively contrast to the petals. Altogether it is a plant of first rate importance in a collection, as the flowers endure in perfection for a long time, and are delightfully fragrant.
Louis Van Houtte ran a famous nursery in Gand (or Ghent) in Belgium. He also published an journal called Flore des Serres et des Jardines de l'Europe (Flora of Greenhouses and of Gardens of Europe), perhaps mainly for advertising purposes. In October 1848, he published a description of Hoya bella that followed Hooker's, with credit to Hooker. The painting, however, was clearly an uncredited, close, though inferior, copy of Walter Hood Fitch's drawing from Curtis's Botanical Magazine. In the April 1849 edition, he had a little illustration showing the habit of the plant and wrote a brief description.⁵⁴
The text description gives the usual high praise for the plant:
Dans notre numéro d'Octobre 1848, nous avons donné une figure de cette charmante plante, avec des détails sur ses caractères et son histoire. La vignette ci-jointe représente la position plus favourable pour en faire ressortir leas beautés. Suspendue dans une élégante corbeille à jour, elle expose à l'œil, sous la pâle verdure de son feuillage, ses jolies étoiles cristallines. Ajoutons à ce que nous avons dit ailleurs de ses charmes, que ses fleurs exhalent un délicieux parfum. Louis Van Houtte
In English:
In our October 1848 issue, we gave a figure of this charming plant, with details of its characteristics and history. The attached vignette represents the most favourable position to bring out its beauties. Suspended in an elegant openwork basket, it exposes to the eye, under the pale verdure of its foliage, its pretty crystalline stars. Let us add to what we have said elsewhere of its charms, that its flowers exhale a delicious perfume. Louis Van Houtte
These descriptions of Hoya bella must have been a delight for the Veitch company. They could not have asked for better advertisements. They would have been able to demand almost any price from the rich aristocrats and businessmen who followed the fashion of growing the newest exotics. On the 9th of June 1849, Hoya bella was awarded a Certificate of Merit at a show held by the Horticultural Society of London.¹
Veitch and Sons advertised "well-grown plants" in The Gardeners' Chronicle of August 1849, along with five other novelties.²² They quoted Hooker's description in the advert. The plants would be ready for delivery from Monday, September 3rd. The cost (if not getting the trade discount) was 63 shillings per plant. In today's money this would be about £300. Though, if you bought three you got another one for free. They warned that "The earliest orders will have the strongest plants."
By the 4th of May 1850, a nursery in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk called Youell and Co. was selling plants for 7 shillings 6 pence.²⁶ That was less than ⅛ of the price asked by Veitch and Son. Youell and Co. did not say how well-grown the plants were. How could they sell at such a price? It seems they were not selling plants from Veitch and Son.
Veitch & Son of Exeter added this footnote to a little puff piece they wrote for the The Florist and Garden Miscellany in January 1850. They were describing Hoya bella and Mitraria coccinea, each collected by one of the Lobb brothers and available for purchase from Veitch & Son.²³
* We have reason to fear there is a spurious plant sent out by some parties as this Hoya; it will be well, therefore, for all persons wishing to possess it, to make sure that they get the TRUE Hoya bella of Hooker.
It is probable that this spurious plant was the mysterious Hoya paxtoni, which I may write about in a later article. W. Dyment wrote about Hoya paxtonii in the 1857 issue of the Cottage Gardener.⁵⁸
I believe that this Hoya was sent out by Van Houtte for H. bella about the same time that the true H. bella made its appearance. However, I happened to obtain both about that time, and grew them side by side.
Hoya paxtoni has leaves twice the length of Hoya bella but is otherwise similar. The pictures Van Houtte had published in 1848 and 1849 were clearly Hoya bella.
Van Houtte had Hoya bella in his catalogue for "Automne et Hiver de 1849 - Printemps et Été de 1850" (Autumn and Winter 1849 - Spring and Summer 1850).⁵⁹ The price was 6 francs. The French/Belgian automne seems to start on the autumn equinox, September 21st. So this catalogue was active 18 days after Veitch and Son offered their plants for 63 shillings.
The catalogue has a helpful exchange rate with sterling on the back page. At the rate given, 6 francs would be equivalent to 4 shillings 9 pence. I assume the (FLORE) after the name meant it was in flower. Clearly many English nurseries decided that buying from Ghent, just a short ferry over the North Sea, for a tenth of the price of plants from Veitch and Son was good business sense. Hoya paxtonii is just as pretty a plant and some gardeners preferred it. It tolerates lower temperatures, making it easier to grow and propagate. No botanist has yet described it properly or named it. The name seems to have just appeared around 1850.
A year later, the Van Houtte supplementary catalogue for 15th of October 1850 had Hoya bella for just 4 francs.⁶⁰ This would be 3 shillings 2 pence. However, Hoya paxtonii was now also listed, also at 4 francs, though not (FLORE). However, we can see the list had more information about both offerings - "Hoya bella (Veitch) (FLORE)" and Hoya "- Paxtonii (Cyrtoceras, Hoya bella, V.H.). Clearly, this was a tacit admission that the previous Hoya bella he (V.H.) had supplied was not the true Hoya bella of Veitch - and of Hooker.
Cyrtoceras was a genus that had already been suggested to be insufficiently different from Hoya and was included in Hoya quite quickly after. The two species of Cyrtoceras did not look much like Hoya paxtonii. Cyrtoceras paxtonii did appear in some lists in the next few years.
Which species was offered by which nurseries (other than Veitch and Son) is impossible to say for a while after that strange episode. Though Edward George Henderson of Wellington-road Nursery, St John's Wood advertised "Hoya bella (Veitch's)" at 10 shillings and 6 pence in the April 27th, 1850 edition of The Gardeners' Chronicle.⁶¹ However, a week later they advertised in the edition for May 4th 1850, offering both "Hoya bella (Veitch's)" and "Hoya bella (continental variety)" for 10s 6d.⁶²
On the 24th of October 1850, Thomas Appleby (Floricultural Manager of Messrs Henderson, Edgeware-road in London, not the same as EG Henderson) wrote that "The price for tolerable good plants is 7s. 6d.". He also wrote that:³
"As the H[oya]. imperialis is one of the most noble of the noble plants, so this is the prettiest of all the pretty ones."
By the 27th of March 1852, Youell and Co. of Great Yarmouth were clearly delighted²⁶ with Hoya bella. Though we can't know if they now had the true one or the Hoya paxtonii they had clearly been selling in April 1850.
HOYA BELLA. This plant has proved itself well worthy the high character given it when first circulated ; it is one of the most lovely plants we know. Plants extra strong, showing bloom, 3s. 6d. ; smaller 2s. 6d.
Bass & Brown of Sudbury, Suffolk advertised³⁵ three price levels of Hoya Bella on the 3rd of April 1852: "Hoya bella, fine plants 1s. 6d., 2s. 6d." and "Hoya bella, with flower-buds, 3s. 6d.". By the 26th of June they had "extra strong, in flower, 3s. 6d."
I referred to two very early herbarium specimens in the taxonomy section above. Both are clearly from cultivated specimens, apparently preserved in 1853 and 1855. As one is from New York via Hamburg and the other from the Netherlands, we can appreciate how fast this easily-propagated and beautiful little plant travelled the world.
My best guess at the label is:
Hoya bella Hook. Bot. Mag. T. 4402?
Obs: Icon a planta nostra vix recedit nisi foliis paucis breviorib., apice minus attenuatis et petiolis pedunculisque brevioribus.
Hort. Booth, Flotbeck prope Hamburg.
Th. 26 May 1853 Leg. Cl. N.
Acc. M. 6 Jun. 53.
******************************************************************************Hoya bella Hook. Curtis' Botanical Magazine T. 4402?
Note: The picture hardly differs from our plant except for the leaves are a little shorter, with a less attenuated tip and shorter petioles and peduncles.
Hortus Booth, Flottbek near Hamburg.
Thursday 26 May 1853 Brought/collected by Cl.[Colonel?] N.
Arrived M.[could be anything but possibly meridiem - noon, matutinus - morning or Manhattan, just across the river from the Port of New York] 6th of June 53
Booth's Garten in Flottbek near Hamburg was a nursery supplying the latest horticultural novelties. A visitor in the 1860s commented "These nurseries are among the most noted in Europe". Founded by the Scottish gardener James Booth, by 1853 it was managed by his widowed daughter-in-law Maria Elisabeth Booth and her father Joachim Lorentz de la Camp.
In the 1850s the Liverpool to New York steamship was taking 11 days or a few hours less. That leaves very little extra time for the part of the journey from Hamburg. It is possible the nursery posted it to Liverpool by mail ship and train which would only take a pair of days and it was then mollycoddled for the ocean voyage by Colonel N.
The old label has "h b lov. 1855" as the only extra information. It appears to have been grown at the Hortus Botanicus Lovaniensis,
the Botanic Garden at Leuven in the Netherlands. About 25 km (15 miles)
from Meise. The specimen is from the collection of the Belgian botanist
and chemist Martin Martens (1797 - 1863). The tendency of the leaf bases to fold over and look like the leaves of Hoya lanceolata can be seen clearly in the other specimen of a greenhouse Hoya bella from the Meise Herbarium, pressed in 1967.
Hoya bella went on to be offered by many nurseries across the world but Veitch also carried on selling it. In their catalogue of indoor plants for 1911, James Veitch & Sons, Ltd. had 6 species of Hoya, including Hoya bella. All the species were priced at 3 shillings and 6 pence. By then James Veitch & Sons, Ltd. had four nurseries in the Southeast of England - at Chelsea, Norbiton, Langley and Feltham.²⁵
Variegated forms
In 1984, Ruurd van Donkelaar started producing a newsletter for his succulent and Hoya specialist nursery in Werkendam, the Netherlands. In the first issue he included a little piece on the announcement of two new variegated varieties that had appeared among the huge stock of another nursery and were being offered for sale.⁶⁵ Both Hoya bella 'Anneke Buis' and Hoya bella 'Lida Buis' are still available for purchase from shops or swaps among Hoya enthusiasts. Unfortunately, Fa. G. Buis of Aalsmeer appears to be permanently closed.
Nieuwe Hoya bella vormenRoughly translated to English:
Bij de F[irm]a.Buis in Aalsmeer zijn enkele nieuwe Hoya vormen ontstaan uit de bekende Hoya bella. De Fa.Buis kweekt al vele jaren een tiental Hoya soorten op grote schaal die via de veiling in de bloemendetailhandel terecht komen. Mede door hun kon de Hoya zo'n populaire kamerplant worden.
Nu zijn tussen hun vele H.bella's spontaan mutaties opgedoken, twee leuke bonte vormen. De ene is groen met een geel-witte bladrand en heeft de naam gekregen 'Anneke Buis'. Het is een goed groeiende hangplant en erg attractief door de bladtekening. Langzamer groeit de vorm 'Lida Buis' die gele blaadjes heeft met een groene rand. Het is een leuke vorm voor een bescheidener plaats. Beide vormen vragen veel licht en zijn vochtgevoelig. Weldra zult u de eerste ongetwijfelt in de bloemenzaken tegen komen. Ook bij ons zijn al beperkt stekken en grote planten de koop.
New Hoya bella formsThanks to Rachel Colette Conroy of the International Hoya Cultivars Authority for pointing me at the source for that one. Googling "variegated hoya bella" was never going to get me very far in investigating that. Too many commercial interests competing for my attention.
At the Buis company in Aalsmeer, several new Hoya forms have emerged from the well-known Hoya bella. Firma Buis has been cultivating ten Hoya species on a large scale for many years, which end up in the flower retail trade via auction. Partly because of them, the Hoya has become such a popular houseplant.
Now, among their many H. bellas, spontaneous mutations have appeared, two nice variegated forms. One is green with a yellow-white leaf edge and has been given the name 'Anneke Buis'. It is a well-growing hanging plant and very attractive because of the leaf pattern. The form 'Lida Buis' grows more slowly, with yellow leaves with a green edge. It is a nice form for a more humble place. Both forms require a lot of light and are sensitive to moisture. You will undoubtedly soon come across the first in the flower shops. We also have limited cuttings and large plants for sale.
Lobb's other Hoyas
Thomas Lobb collected at least eight Hoyas for Veitch.
Hoya campanulata is a spectacular species from Java first drawn from life for Edwards's Botanical Register from a plant given to them by Veitch in April 1846.⁴¹ This plant is not so popular now the novelty has passed, as it is large and prefers high temperature and humidity. Though Hoya campanulata is still available for swap or purchase among Hoya collectors and from specialist Hoya suppliers. I have used the painting from Curtis's Botanical Magazine in 1850⁴² because it looks much better, Walter Hood Fitch was an excellent botanical illustrator, as we saw from his picture of Hoya bella above.
Thomas Lobb had collected a Hoya in the Khasi Hills near Nowgong at about 1,500 feet (460 metres). Perhaps Nagaon in Assam, though that is not in the Khasi Hills. In 1885, that plant was named by his old travelling companion JD Hooker as Hoya lobbii.⁴⁶ There are two herbarium specimens from Lobb on GBIF
but neither has a collection date. One does have the comment "Com.
Veitch 3/68". I presume that herbarium specimen was prepared from a
plant grown by the Veitch nursery then provided to Kew Gardens in March
1868.
His main object may have been orchids but he never passed up a beautiful Hoya or Nepenthes, among the many other ornamental plants he collected. Thomas Lobb also collected a plant from Java depicted in Curtis's Botanical Magazine in 1852 as Hoya fraterna.⁴⁵ It has been determined by Michele Rodda that the plant pictured was not the Hoya fraterna first described by Carl Ludwig Blume but a Hoya meliflua, first described by Manuel Blanco as Stapelia meliflua then transferred to the genus Hoya by Edwin D Merrill. That bewildering story can be read at the reference given.⁴⁴
Other splendid Hoya species introduced alive by Lobb and grown by Veitch's nursery are H. cinnamomifolia, H. coriacea, H. coronaria and H. purpureofusca.²⁴ Like H. bella,
H. campanulata, H. lobbii, and H. meliflua, all of these are still grown and highly sought-after by Hoya
collectors.
Thomas Lobb
I am not going to try to compete with the Wikipedia pages for William Lobb and Thomas Lobb, they seem quite detailed. Many biographies state that the sources for their lives are uncertain and contradictory. All that I have read on the subject suggests that some people have just made assumptions and put them down as facts.
JSTOR Global Plants states that Thomas Lobb was born in Perranarworthal.¹⁶ The Plant Hunters by Toby Musgrave has the family in Egloshayle (35 km or 25 miles to the north-east) until 1831 when they moved, the father getting work at Carclew Estate near Perranarworthal. Thomas and William Lobb were also employed on the estate,⁴⁷ being mentioned as being gardeners from 1837.²⁴
JSTOR also give his years of life as 1820 to 1894.¹⁶ Toby Musgrave has his dates as 1811 to 1894.⁴⁷ The tombstone for Thomas Lobb pictured on the Wikipedia page states he was 76 in 1894 when he died. So he must have been born in 1817 or 1818. So, let's ignore all the uncertain early life and move straight on to the start of the voyages to the east.
Among the places visited by Thomas Lobb over his 17 years of plant-collecting were British Burma, British India, Dutch Java and the nearby islands, British Malaya (on the Peninsula), British North Borneo, British Labuan, the Spanish Philippines and British Singapore.²⁴
To start with, in January 1843, Thomas Lobb was instructed in his first contract as a plant collector with the Veitch nursery to visit Singapore. If China was not amenable to allowing him in, he was to continue to Java and nearby islands.²⁴ Three species from Java were quickly flowered by Veitch. Aeschynanthus purpurascens flowered in March 1846, illustrated as Tab. 4236 in the June edition of Curtis's Botanical Magazine. Aeschynanthus lobbianus, now called Aeschynanthus pulcher flowered from June to August 1846 and it was illustrated as Tab. 4260 in the October edition of Curtis's Botanical Magazine.⁵⁴ Lobb also collected the first example of Aeschynanthus pulcher, which flowered in June and July and was illustrated as Tab. 4264, in the November 1846 edition of Curtis's Botanical Magazine.
Drawing and lithography by Walter Hood Fitch⁵⁴
In 1845, Thomas Lobb collected in Kedah, Penang and Malacca in the Peninsula of Malaya. In 1846, Lobb sent dried specimens and wood from the mountains of Singapore to William Jackson Hooker at Kew Gardens of the tree that produces Gutta Percha. Unfortunately, there was not enough of the flower to classify the new species.⁵⁶ Hooker requested more samples from Dr Thomas Oxley in Singapore and finally named the species Isonandra gutta from those.⁵⁷ It is now called Palaquium gutta. Dendrobium cretaceum was reported to have been sent by Lobb to the Veitch nursery from Moulmein in 1846.²⁴
Thomas Lobb added to his income from the Veitch nursery by selling herbarium sheets of the plants he had collected. As long as he did not include ripe fruit with viable seeds in it, there was no conflict with the interests of Veitch. The sheets from Java and Singapore were sold in sets of 100 by a specialised agent who often sold herbarium collections, Robert Heward of Kensington in London.³⁷ Apparently, a "very large collection" of that batch of herbarium specimens had been lost in a shipwreck before they could get back to England. Some dried herbarium specimens from Mawlamyine had arrived in 1847.³⁸ Dendrobium tortile was said to have been sent by Lobb from Mergui in Tenasserim (Tanintharyi) in 1847.⁵⁵ The Mergui Archipelago is at the very southernmost part of Myanmar.
Lobb returned to England in late 1847. After a year and a bit, he set off for India again in December 1848.⁴⁷
Joseph Dalton Hooker made an offer to travel with Lobb to the mountains of north-east India in summer 1849 but they never managed to arrange it. At the end of September 1849, Hooker says Lobb had caught a "Tartar" of a fever because he had sneered at fevers.⁴⁸ From his letters, it seems Hooker spent a lot of 1850 travelling with or bumping into Lobb in north-east India.
Hooker mentioned Lobb in a letter to Hooker's father (Director of Kew Gardens) in London, dated March 18th 1850.³⁹ Hooker had met Thomas Lobb in Darjeeling and Kurseong in the foothills of the eastern Himalayas.
Pages 2-3
I saw Lobb at Darjiling and also on my way down, at Khersiong, he is a most steady industrious & well to do man. Tom will have some botanizing with him on his way up, (for I leave him at the hills.) Lobb does not seem to think Darjiling so good as Cossya for his purposes, (Orchideae) & doubts it being worth his while going into the country after Rhododendrons the expense & risk of losing them is so great. Now we have added so much to our possessions, he can get 14 or 18 species without any personal danger, but must of course go as I did in the rains when transport is all but out of the question. He has filled one very little Ward's case with beautiful young plants of argenteum, he doubts if he will stay more than 6 weeks where he is.Pages 9-10
Griffiths has twice botanised Khassya, Jenkins Lobb & collectors without number have been there. Doubtless the Botany is far richer though not so new as Nepaul.
Khersiong = Kurseong, 11 km (7 miles) south of Darjeeling
JD Hooker's letter of the 27th of April 1850 shows signs of his getting to know Lobb much better after a month of travelling together.⁴⁷
Lobb has left us, he was a most steady industrious man, but made no sort of a companion either to Tom or myself, or to us in company -- he is so conceited & pragmatical & prosy. He had a wonderful eye & all his arrangements seemed perfect for roots & plants - his plan of small glazed cases is admirable & I hope he will introduce the live Rhododendrons.
On the 21st of June 1850, Hooker wrote to his father from Cherrapunji in the Khasi Hills, but it seems Lobb was avoiding him.⁵¹
Lobb was here & will doubtless send you good dried specimens of many things I am too late for, for though too early for the flora in general we are too late for the spring Orchideae. He is a most steady respectable man, but dreadfully conceited & he quite avoided us in Sikkim, which T[homas Thomson]. remarked quite independently -- for T. sought his company during my absence in Calcutta. He pooh-poohed Sikkim & has a very poor opinion of Lindley & Wallich ! ! ! He really is dreadfully conceited. Travellers find strange bed-fellows you know. In his deportment he is very modest & extremely well behaved.
Another meeting with Lobb was recorded in Hooker's letter from Cherrapunji to his father on 8th of August 1850.⁵²
Lobb arrived today ! to the great amusement of all the people here for when here before he snubbed the hills & their plants, being naturally jealous of other parties sending the fine things home. He is a remarkably steady honest industrious hard working & intelligent man but ridiculously conceited & opinionative when you come to converse with him. We expect great fun[?] with him. We had accommodation for him here, but he met Col. Lister on his way up who sent him to his house.
On the 21st of October 1850, Hooker met Lobb again. He wrote from Myrung (Mairung/Mayrong?) in the Khasi Hills.⁵⁰
We meet Lobb here, we arriving on the same day from Jyntea as he did from Nungklow -- we spent the evening & following morning most pleasantly, but he would not stay even a day with us, though in no hurry, it appears odd to me he talks very slightingly of the plants & seeds as usual & to judge by what he says he cannot be worth 6d to Veitch & Co. His plants he says die en route to Calcutta & that it is almost useless sending roots bulbs or cuttings straight home from there.
In this he is I am sure quite correct they should all be overhauled in Calcutta, the dead ones thrown away & if possible the living restored a little He says my Nepenthes is distillatoria & may be right, but if so, it is greatly handsomer than even McNab's specimen.
More about Lobb's personality appears in another letter by JD Hooker to his father, dated the 26th of November 1850.⁴⁰
What a splendid fellow Paxton must be, his success will kill Lobb who calls P[axton]. a very poor stick, thinks very little of Lindley & talks of giving up taking the Gard[eners] Chron[icle].! Mr Lobb is a most thoroughly respectable well conducted man, but you are woefully mistaken about his modesty. I fear he will not collect in Malabar except you write to Veitch about it & that is of all others the least explored & most promising part of India - a dreadful climate however. but Lobb is obstinate & will get through I hope.
This letter appears to have arrived in London on 20th May, via Marseilles. The transport from the north-east coast of India to London must have taken about two months and two days. The reference to "our possessions" reinforces the impression that it was mostly new additions to the British Empire that were safe enough to reach for the saner plant collectors, while still having a novel flora for supplying the market in Britain and Europe. Later in the same letter, Joseph Dalton Hooker stated that he would not try to enter Bhutan for plant collecting "without 500 men ahead of him and 500 behind".
In 1850, The Florist and Garden Miscellany published²³ a description of Hoya bella by the Veitch company that ended with an assurance that no plant collectors were harmed in the production of these plants. They stated that William Lobb had explored the Western hemisphere and Thomas had explored the Eastern hemisphere "with but little illness, and without meeting with a single accident, or with any insult or molestation from the natives."
Thomas Lobb suffered an injury in the Philippines¹⁶ in 1860 that led to the amputation of a leg. The actual phrase used in the Hortus Veitchii²⁴ is:
As the result of exposure in his work, he had the misfortune to lose one of his legs, ...
This is such an odd phrasing that many biographies just repeat it without attempting to interpret it. In modern times, we would immediately think of exposure to cold. Which may be possible if he was at high altitude in the Philippines. However, I would parse it as "exposure to risk" or "exposure to danger". The Oxford English Dictionary points to an example from the second volume of Arctic Explorations by Elisha Kent Kane, published in 1856. In this case they were cold as well, obviously. In full that sentence is:
We struggled manfully to force our way through,— days and nights of adventurous exposure and recurring disaster,—and at last found our way back to the brig, Morton broken down anew, and my own energies just adequate to the duty of supervising our final departure.
James Veitch Jr obviously saw himself as an enlightened employer with a duty to avoid discrimination against the disabled, especially when they had made him a considerable fortune. Veitch proposed that he would continue to pay for Lobb to hop around the world and continue plant collecting. Lobb declined.
Lobb retired to the village of Devoran in Cornwall to tend his own garden. Devoran is near the end of Cornwall, just across the River Carnon from his childhood home of Perranarworthal.¹⁶
In Lobb's obituary in the Gardener's Chronicle in 1894, they mentioned that²:
It is a matter of some little interest, that Lobb was staying with the late James Veitch on the occasion of his [Veitch's] sudden death, being the only time he had been induced to quit his Cornish home since the loss of his limb.
Wikipedia suggests that the author Sue Shephard believed that Lobb had contributed to Veitch's death by heart attack while visiting in 1869 due to an argument about Lobb resuming collecting. Lobb's obituary² had implied that the proposal to continue collecting was made closer to 1860. Veitch's obituary in the Gardener's Chronicle gave a different slant on Lobb's visit.¹⁴
Some two years ago, owing to premonitory symptoms of heart disease, which have proved too well founded, Mr. Veitch ceased to take so active a part as he had been wont, either in horticultural affairs or in matters of business; but latterly he had been in better health and spirits than usual, and even on the day before his decease had greatly enjoyed a visit from his old friend and collector, Thomas Lobb, so that his death on the morning of the 10th inst., at Stanley House, Chelsea, at the age of 54, came suddenly on his family and friends, although, under the circumstances, it can scarcely be said to have been wholly unexpected. ... ... That he himself was not unprepared for the change that was to befal him is shown by the fact that only a few days before his death he selected, without the knowledge of any member of his family, a site for a family grave; ...
I would rather put the happier interpretation on these events. Thomas had seen very little of his brother William over the previous 20 years as they had been plant-collecting at opposite ends of the Earth. William's many plant collections were as famous and celebrated as those of Thomas. Dozens of them still grace British gardens. Most visibly, even from a distance, the monkey puzzle tree, California redwood and giant sequoia. William had gone back to America again in 1854 and stayed there, despite being exhausted and ill. We know that the family lost contact with William in 1860. They heard nothing more of him until his death in San Francisco in 1864.⁴⁷
If Veitch got heated in trying to persuade Lobb to continue plant-hunting in 1860, Thomas Lobb was probably not in the mood for polite discussion. We know from Joseph Dalton Hooker's description of him that Lobb was
intelligent, polite, hard working and diligent. We also know that he was
obstinate, opinionated, conceited and critical of others. His brother's disappearance and his own experiences probably gave him pause to consider what he wanted for his own life. He probably did not want to lose his life to plant-hunting. After 17 years, he had probably had enough of adventure and the responsibility of managing complex operations in unpredictable situations.
Thomas Lobb and James Veitch did not speak again until Veitch invited Lobb to visit in 1869. Veitch had surely given up on his hopes of getting Lobb to collect again as his own frailness became apparent. Lobb would surely not have travelled from Cornwall if there was any hint that he was going to be hassled about returning to work in the East. When Veitch realised he was close to dying, he wanted to ensure that he healed the rift between them before it was too late. The excitement of that meeting, or just the effort of sitting upright for a while, was enough to carry Veitch off the next day.
Lobb died on the 30th of April 1894. He was 76 years old.
Waxflower
I was excited to find a Burmese vernacular name for Hoya bella - "payaung ban",¹² Rather disappointingly, this name seems to translate as "wax flower". I think this is probably a Burmese translation of the English name. In Burmese script that is probably ဖယောင်း ပန်း.
The garden supplies store G. Thorburn & Son of 67 Liberty Street, New York produced an 84 page Catalogue for 1827. They listed 11 pages of green house plants. For $2 you could buy a Hoya carnosa - "Chinese Splendid Hoya, or Wax Flower".²⁰ Their 1825 catalogue only had the name Chinese Splendid Hoya and charged $3.¹⁹
Thorburn & Son took orders for their customers for "Fruit, Forest and Ornamental Trees, from the Linnæan Garden and Nursery of William Prince, Flushing, ..." That same William Prince of Flushing, New York published a book called A Short Treatise on Horticulture in 1828. He wrote of Hoya carnosa: "It is frequently called the Wax Flower, as it has the appearance of wax-work."¹⁸ Prince had offered Hoya carnosa as the Chinese Splendid Hoya for $5 in 1822.¹⁷
Bartram's Botanic Garden of Kingsessing, four miles from Philadelphia, published a Catalogue in 1828. They had Hoya carnosa for $1. Their English name for the plant was Chinese wax plant.⁶
Flower structure
The cross-section below shows that the purple corona is not as solid as it looks. Though they give the impression of little hard-boiled sweets, a carved lump of candle-wax or polished gems, the lobes of the corona are hollow.
You can also see that the white petals of the corolla have a dense, short velvet or flock covering the entire upper side (or lower side when the flowers are hanging free on the plant). This surface is very optically active, very bright white and so difficult to photograph. Many of my photos came out with flares and glare or ghostly auras. The dense pelt of hairs is also quite difficult to photograph.
Hoya bella is related to Stephanotis floribunda, both being in the Marsdenieae section of the asclepiads. The very distinctive flower structure of the asclepiads can be seen in both, though with a topological transformation. The annotated cross-section of a Stephanotis floribunda flower can be seen in my article on that plant, with a little explanation of the peculiarities.
References
¹ Anon. "Horticultural Society of London. Exhibition, June 9, 1849. Award of the Judges." Gardeners' Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette (1849) 24: June 16th, p. 370 https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/32083024#page/377/mode/1up
² Anon. "Thomas Lobb" Gardeners' Chronicle (1894) 3(15): May 19th, p 636 https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/83806#page/664/mode/1up
³ Appleby, T "Hothouse Department. Stove Plants." The Cottage Gardener (1851) 5 (October 24th): 50 https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/25643812#page/62/mode/1up
⁴ Averyanov, LV et al "Preliminary checklist of Hoya (Asclepiadaceae) in the flora of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam" (2017) Turczaninowia 20(3): 103–147 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320010983_Preliminary_checklist_of_Hoya_Asclepiadaceae_in_the_flora_of_Cambodia_Laos_and_Vietnam
³⁵ Bass & Brown "New and Select Plants" Gardeners' Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette (1852) 14 (3rd of April): 209
"New and Select Plants" Gardeners' Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette (1852) 26 (26th of June): 403
https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/96138#page/216/mode/1up
https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/96138#page/410/mode/1up
⁵ Brown, R "On the Asclepiadeæ" Memoirs of the Wernerian Natural History Society (1811) 1: 26-27 https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/165544#page/64/mode/1up
⁶ Carr, Robert Periodical Catalogue of Fruit and Ornamental Trees and Shrubs, Green House Plants, &c. cultivated and for sale at Bartram's Botanic Garden, Kingsessing, Near Gray's Ferry—Four miles from Philadelphia. (1828, Russell and Martien, Philadelphia) p. 12 https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/272761#page/22/mode/1up
⁶³ Chamberlain, D "Hoya bella (All White Flower) H. sp. aff. Bella PES03" Vermont Hoyas website (10/7/2018) Accessed 24/11/2024
https://vermonthoyas.com/hoya-species/hoya-bella-all-white-flower/
⁶⁶ Cijsouw, R "New variegated Hoya bella mutation." Plant & Interieur Homepage (2023) September 16th
https://www.planteninterieur.com/post/new-variegated-hoya-bella-mutation
⁷ Compiled by Authority The British Burma Gazetteer in two volumes (1879, Government Press, Rangoon) Vol. II, 216 https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.283037/page/n217/mode/2up
⁶⁵ van Donkelaar, R Hoya Nieuwsbrief (1984, Institute for Protection and Propagation of Succulent Plants, Werkendam) April No. 1
http://www.ruurdvandonkelaar.nl/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Hoya-Nieuwsbrief-1.pdf
https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/466904#page/188/mode/1up
https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/6317#page/35/mode/1up
⁵⁷ H[ooker], WJ "Botanical Characters of a new plant, (ISONANDRA Gutta,) yielding the Gutta Percha of Commerce" The London Journal of Botany (1847) 6: 463-465 & Tab. XVII
https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/6317#page/465/mode/1up
https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/467118#page/188/mode/1up
³³ Huang, E-F et al "Hoya longicalyx, a new species of Hoya (Apocynaceae: Asclepiadoideae) from Yunnan, China" Taiwania (2020) 65(3): 353‒359, 2020 DOI: 10.6165/tai.2020.65.353
https://www.proquest.com/openview/07c65c31e1eac50dfd50c69d72dec8c5/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7979681/
⁶⁴ Jagtap, AP & Singh, NP "H. bella" Fascicles of Flora of India (1999) 24: 96-97
https://bsi.gov.in/page/en/fascicles-of-flora-of-india
³¹ Karen News "Karen Officials Recommend Suspending Rock Quarrying on Taung Kalay Mountain" Karen News October 17, 2017
https://karennews.org/2017/10/kayin-officials-recommend-suspending-rock-quarrying-on-taung-kalay-mountain/ Accessed 22/9/2024
³² Kent, DH "Notes on HOYA in Cultivation (1)" Asklepios (1981) 23: 24-28 Not available online yet.
⁹ Kew Gardens "Hoya bella Hook." Plants of the World Online http://powo.science.kew.org/taxon/urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:98387-1 and related species
¹⁰ Kew Gardens "Wattakaka volubilis (L.f.) Stapf" Plants of the World Online http://powo.science.kew.org/taxon/urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:103061-1
¹¹ Kew Botanic Gardens Herbarium search https://data.kew.org/records/#tab_simpleSearch
¹² Kress, WJ et al "A Checklist of the Trees, Shrubs, Herbs, and Climbers of Myanmar" Contributions from the United States National Herbarium (2003) 45: 155 https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/384769#page/166/mode/1up
²⁸ Larsen, K "Hoya engleriana Hosseus" (1974) Collector number 34404 Herbarium sheet: Specimen P00700531, Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, Paris (France) Collection: Vascular plants (P) http://coldb.mnhn.fr/catalognumber/mnhn/p/p00700531 Accessed 1/3/2021
¹³ Larsen, K "33404" & "34404" (1974) Tropicos website, Missouri Botanical Garden http://legacy.tropicos.org/Specimen/1086705 http://legacy.tropicos.org/Specimen/1084619
²⁹ Liede-Schumann, S, Reuss, SJ, Meve, U, Gâteblé, G, Livshultz, T, Forster, PI, Wanntorp, L & Rodda, M (2022), "Phylogeny of Marsdenieae (Apocynaceae, Asclepiadoideae) based on chloroplast and nuclear loci, with a conspectus of the genera" Taxon (2022) 71(4): 833-875 https://doi.org/10.1002/tax.12713 Accessed 6/10/2022
⁴¹ Lindley, J "Hoya campanulata Bell-flowered Hoya" Edwards's Botanical Register (1847) 33/X: Plate 54 & Text
https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/243565#page/156/mode/1up
¹⁴ M., T. "The Late James Veitch" Gardeners' Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette (1869) (38): September 18th, p 990 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015065656384&view=1up&seq=1002
¹⁵ Mason, F The Natural Productions of Burmah, or Notes on the Fauna, Flora, and Minerals of the Tenasserim Provinces and the Burman Empire (1850, American Mission Press, Maulmain [Mawlamyine]) p. 20 https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/26850#page/46/mode/1up
https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/48335801#page/342/mode/1up
¹⁷ Prince, William Catalogue of Fruit and Ornamental Trees and Plants, Bulbous Flower Roots, Green-house Plants, &c. &c. 21st Edition (1822, T. and J. Swords, New York) p. 103 https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/43890861#page/109/mode/1up
¹⁸ Prince, William A Short Treatise on Horticulture: etc. (1828, T. and J. Swords, New York) p. 194 https://archive.org/details/shorttreatiseonh00prinrich/page/194/mode/2up
³⁶ Randal, M & Nyhuus, T "Revisited: Hoya Lanceolata Wall ex D. Don and Similar Species, Subspecies, and Forms." Stemma (2007) 1(3): 19-35https://stemmajournal.org/?page_id=34
⁴⁴ Rodda, M "Taxonomy and typification of Hoya meliflua (Apocynaceae, Asclepiadoideae)" Phytotaxa (2016) 247 (4): 287–291
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Michele-Rodda/publication/295872755_Taxonomy_and_typification_of_Hoya_meliflua_Apocynaceae_Asclepiadoideae
³⁰ Temple, RC "Notes on Antiquities in Ramannadesa (The Talaing Country of Burma)" The Indian Antiquary (1893,) XXII: 383
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.206683/page/n373/mode/2up
¹⁹ Thorburn, G & Son Catalogue of Kitchen Garden, Herb, Flower, Tree and Grass Seeds, Bulbous Flower Roots, &c. &c. &c. (1825) p. 55 https://archive.org/details/catalogueofkitch1825gtho/page/54/mode/2up
²⁷ Thaithong, O et al "Hoya vaccinioides Hook.f." Handbook of Asclepiads of Thailand (2018, Amarin Printing and Publishing, Bangkok) 26-261 Not online.
²⁰ Thorburn, G & Son Catalogue of Kitchen Garden, Herb, Flower, Tree and Grass Seeds, Bulbous Flower Roots, &c. &c. &c. (1827) p. 56 https://archive.org/details/catalogueofkitch1827gtho/page/56/mode/2up
²¹ Traill, J "Accounts and Descriptions of several Plants belonging to the Genus Hoya, which are cultivated in the Garden of the Horticultural Society at Chiswick." Transactions of the Horticultural Society of London (1830) 7: 19-22 https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/155840#page/44/mode/1up
⁵⁴ Van Houtte, L "Hoya bella" Flore des Serres et des Jardines de l'Europe (1849, Gand, Belgium) 5: 457c
https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/54913#page/130/mode/1up
⁵⁹ Van Houtte, L "Serre Chaude" Prix Courant de Louis Van Houtte Horticulteur (Automne et Hiver de 1849 - Printemps et Été de 1850, Gand/Ghent, Belgium) 38: 8
https://archive.org/details/vHoutte1849Serres/page/8/mode/2up
²² Veitch and Son "New and Rare Plants" Gardeners' Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette (1849) 34: August 25th, p 529 https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/32083183#page/536/mode/1up
²³ Veitch & Son "Hoya bella and Mitraria coccinea" The Florist and Garden Miscellany (1850. London) Illustration & 1-2 https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/6092124#page/18/mode/1up
https://archive.org/details/manualoforchidac12jame/page/n101/mode/2up
²⁶ Youell and Co. "The Finest Carnations, Picotees, &c. &c." Gardeners' Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette (1850) 18: May 4th, p 273
"Choice Plants" Gardeners' Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette (1852) 13: March 27th, p 194
https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/32488750#page/281/mode/1up
https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/96138#page/201/mode/1up
²⁷ see under Thaithong et al. Sorry, added after finishing and I could not be bothered to re-number every reference after 20. Edited to add - I got very carried away adding new references. I doubt I will ever renumber them all, I am afraid.
²⁸ ditto for Larsen.
²⁹ ditto for Liede-Schumann et al.
³⁰ ditto for Temple.
³¹ ditto for Karen News.
³² ditto for Kent.
³³ ditto for Huang et al (2020)
³⁴ ditto for Huang et al (2021)
³⁵ ditto for Bass & Brown (1852)
³⁶ ditto for Randal, M & Nyhuus, T (2007)
³⁷ ditto for Heward, R (1846)
³⁸ ditto for Planchon, JE (1847)
³⁹ ditto for Hooker, JD (18/3/1850)
⁴⁰ ditto for Hooker, JD (26/11/1850)
⁴¹ ditto for Lindley, J (1847)
⁴² ditto for Fitch, W (1850)
⁴³ ditto for Merrill, ED (1915)
⁴⁴ ditto for Rodda, M (2016)
⁴⁵ ditto for Hooker, WJ (1852)
⁴⁶ ditto for Hooker, JD (1885)
⁴⁷ ditto for Hooker, JD (27/4/1850)
⁴⁸ ditto for Hooker, JD (28/9/1849)
⁴⁹ ditto for Hooker, JD (25/8/1850)
⁵⁰ ditto for Hooker, JD (21/10/1850)
⁵¹ ditto for Hooker, JD (21/6/1850)
⁵² ditto for Hooker, JD (8/8/1850)
⁵³ ditto for Paxton, J (1849)
⁵⁴ ditto for Hooker, WJ (1846)
⁵⁵ ditto for Veitch, J & Sons (1888)
⁵⁶ ditto for Hooker, WJ (1847)
⁵⁷ ditto for Hooker, WJ (1847)
⁵⁸ ditto for Dyment, W (1856)
⁵⁹ ditto for Van Houtte, L (1849-1850)
All photos are mine unless credited to someone else.
