Names Have Roots – Details, episodes & analysis

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.

If you know something that isn't written down anywhere, this show wants it.