To call the numerous Hoya species, wax plants, is both deserving and unjust. The leaves of many of the vining species are waxy. This modification makes hoyas that much more dear. They will tolerate a bit of benign neglect. But it is unjust to shrug these plants off as if they were commoners, just wax plants. Hoyas would not have been grown by so many people for the past two hundred years if they were not outstanding specimens.

In the home of an antiquities dealer, there is a Hoya carnosa hanging in front of a long window. The myriad vines completely cover a 24-inch pot and drape to the floor eight feet below, a column of green and white. In a house filled with fine art, it is the only plant. When pressed for information, the dealer stated the plant has started as a joke, a cutting thrown in with his first big antiquities trade. But after 50 years, this hoya was a lifelong companion.

Hoyas were relatively new to the catalogued botanical world in the later years of the 18th Century. Thomas Hoy served as gardener to the Duke of Northumberland from 1788 to 1809. The Duke was an avid collector of rare plants and it was Hoy's duty to keep the Duke's collection alive. Hoy's name is almost lost to history except that he was an extraordinary gardener. With an almost intuitive sense about tropical plants, Hoy made the Duke's collection flourish.

Robert Brown was a surgeon's mate who began his botanical career in 1801 sailing to Australia collecting plants for Sir Joseph Banks. When he returned to England, he had about 4,000 specimens of plants from this uncharted land. For the rest of his life he worked cataloguing and studying plants for the Linnean Society of London and the British Museum.

But Brown is little remembered for botanical work for he made two discoveries critical to science: Brownian movement (the motion of tiny particles) and the nucleus of a cell. In essence, Robert Brown gave the world more clues on the long roads leading to modern physics and genetics. Seventy-eight years later, Albert Einstein studying Brownian movement, related the energy of the molecules with their absolute temperature--Boltzmann's constant. One hundred and twenty-five years later, Watson and Crick deduced the nature of DNA.

When exactly Robert Brown and Thomas Hoy became friends is not known. But Brown decided to honor the gardener and in 1810 named the genus Hoya.