The botanical history of the genus Streptocarpus goes back to 1818, when the first species was collected by the royal plant collector, James Bowie, on the property of George Rex in the town of Knysna in the Cape Province of South Africa. This was in a period of significant botanical exploration of the South African Flora after the British had taken over the administration of the Cape Colony from the Dutch in 1805.
Seed was sent to Kew Botanical Gardens where the director of the Botanical Garden of Glasgow, William Jackson Hooker, saw the plants in cultivation and was clearly charmed. Hooker described the plant in the Indian genus Didymocarpus as Didymocarpus rexii, in honor George Rex. In his original description Hooker named the species as Didymocarpus rexii Bowie to honor the collector, James Bowie, but because he had authored the publication, the species became known as Didymocarpus rexii Hooker (Hooker W. J., 1827). Hooker goes on to mention that the plant was charming as a horticultural subject and that Mr Aiton at Kew Botanical Gardens was the first cultivator. It is therefore quite clear that the species had immediately attracted horticultural attention. The publication was in a book, which thanks to the Biodiversity Library, can now be accessed online where it is illustrated with a beautiful drawing.
John Lindley (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lindley ) described this species for the first time as Streptocarpus rexii in 1828, clearly stating that he was naming the genus Streptocarpus because of its twisted (strepto) capsules (carpus) (Lindley, 1828).
Probably as a result of the attention that Streptocarpus rexii drew because it was an attractive horticultural subject, Hooker illustrated the species in Curtis’s Botanical Journal in 1830 (Hooker W. J., 1830). By 1883, C.B. Clarke reported 17 species in the genus (Clarke, 1883) and since then the numbers of described species have increased steadily.