Our understanding of how plant hormones work has tremendously increased over the last decades. However, such progress was not possible without those who laid the foundation of the work which was sometimes much more tedious in early days than today. Therefore, we thought it timely to follow-up on historical aspects of plant hormone research. The development in the field of auxins, cytokinins, gibberellins, abscisic acid, jasmonates, brassinosteroids, and ethylene are accompanied with personal recollections. Plant hormones cannot go without plant growth regulators which have been developed for commercial reasons, but are also used in many cases nowadays as tools to investigate a specific role of a hormone in planta. This issue is also hopefully a useful collection for those scientists who want to get an overview of how their “favorite hormone” started.