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The Orchid Zone’s P. rothschildianum ‘Rex’ FCC/AOS x ‘Mont Millais’ FCC/AOS cross set a new standard in roth breeding some time ago, blowing way past the previous ‘Charles E.’ FCC/AOS x ‘Borneo’ FCC/AOS cross.  No one had seen roths as imposing, formidable and majestic — it was quite a historic day in the San Francisco AOS judging meeting when OZ brought in this roth crop.  Some in the room were astonished, and some were…crushed.  The grex was awarded a number of FCCs and AMs, and also received an AQ (Award of Quality), and deservedly so.  Of course, the judges passed over some of the best ones (as usual — sort of like calls against the USA in World Cup soccer), but at least they didn’t get them all wrong.  Not that that would ever happen, of course.

OZ took the best of this grex and did what they do best: bred onwards and upwards.  I once asked Terry Root if I could see ‘Mont Millais’ FCC/AOS.  He said he had sold the whole plant, and no longer had it.  I was astounded, and asked him why he had let go of such an historic plant.  His response: “Why do I need it?” (meaning he believed he’d gotten all he could from its genes which resided now in MM’s progeny).  There is some deep breeder wisdom here, for those interested in pondering…

These seedlings derive from the best of the best of the progeny from the’Rex’ x ‘Mont Millais’ group, ‘Rex’ x ‘Nan Chou’, as well as other highly select plants Terry keeps for breeding. Many people think that the ‘Rex’ x ‘MM’ plants that got the FCC’s are the best of that crop. WRONG! (and that’s a good thing for all of us).  Great breeders keep their greatest plants in reserve — submitting for judging could actually lower their value, especially if you get a bad score because of bad judges. (Ahem… I won’t enter into my usual tirade on this point.)

In any case, the very best of the roths that OZ produced have been bred, and their progeny are being released. Here’s a rundown:

NOTE: Pricing was valid when I originally put this list out on my price list.  As these seedlings have now gotten significantly bigger, and will be re-potted into larger pots soon, prices will go up.  I’m thinking it’s 50/50 that Terry will let me get some more at these lower prices, so if you’re interested, please email me ASAP.

a) Z7071 ‘Mighty’ x ‘Red Baron’
‘Mighty’ is from the ‘Rex’ x ‘MM’ cross. I believe it bloomed later than its sibs that received the Award of Quality. ‘Red Baron’ is from the ‘MM’ x ‘Nan Chou’ cross, the latter parent being a particularly dark plant in Taiwan. The owner sent pollen to Terry, who put it on ‘Rex’ and grew up the resulting seedlings. As I recall, some of the recent roth FCC’s came from this cross. In any case, ‘Mighty’ x ‘Red Baron’ is probably the “favored” cross here, although there are many dark horses, and sometimes you get surprised (which is why you should cover all your bets by buying more roths of different crosses!)

Price: $100

b) Z7110 ‘Wide Horizon’ x ‘Chester Hill/OZ’
‘Wide Horizon’ was from the ‘Rex’ x ‘MM’ cross, and its name says it all — a very wide-reaching flower.

‘Chester Hill/OZ’ has an interesting story: Terry Root obtained pollen from Carter & Holmes of ‘Chester Hill’ AM/AOS. While it’s an older cross, I believe Terry liked it because of its petal stance and color. He put this pollen on ‘Rex’ FCC/AOS, and bloomed out the progeny, one of which had particularly large flowers. This is the plant I refer to as ‘Chester Hill/OZ’. He then took this plant, and crossed it with ‘Red Baron’, which was produced from a cross of ‘Nan Chou’ x ‘Mont Millais’. ‘Nan Chou’ is among the deepest colored roths Terry has ever seen.

Price: $75

c) Z7134 ‘Chester Hill/OZ’ x ‘Colossus’
‘Colossus’ is from ‘Rex’ x ‘MM’. I think the name tells us a lot — must be pretty big. Actually, it is well-known that ‘Rex’ produces large flowers, so those genes must be shining through.

Price: $75

d) Z7135 ‘Chester Hill/OZ’ x ‘Red Baron’
(Both parents already described above) Price: $75

e) Z7136 ‘Red Baron’ x ‘Mighty’
This is the reciprocal cross of Z7110. It seems to me that if TR did the reciprocal cross, both of these parents must be superb. There are some who say that the capsule (pod) parent has an added influence on color. I suppose this is possible since the maternal parent contributes extra genes in the mitochondrial DNA found in the egg, but everything I’ve heard is anecdotal. But if this theory holds true, then these progeny will produce darker colored flowers than ‘Mighty’ x’ RB’ cross. So don’t miss out!

Price: $100

f) Z7137 ‘Red Baron’ x ‘Wide Horizon’
Both of these plants (previously described) appear to be good parents, since they’ve been used in multiple crosses.

Price: $75

g) Z7172 ‘Dazzler’ x ‘Buff’
I saw ‘Dazzler’ in bloom last year, and it looked fantastic. Then TR told me this was a crappy blooming. Wow. If what I thought was a really great blooming didn’t hit TR’s standards, then I wonder what it’s select progeny will do! ‘Buff’ is Rex x MM, so I would expect these progeny to bloom out very robustly.

Price: $75 or $100 (sorry, will need to confirm)

h) Z7174 ‘Red Rider’ x ‘Buff’
‘Red Rider’ is from ‘Rex’ x ‘Nan Chou’ and ‘Buff’ is a ‘Rex’ x ‘MM’. This is a parallel cross to ‘Mighty’ x’ Red Baron’. If you’re looking to get some excellent 2nd generation plants, it is definitely a good idea to spread your bets — it’s well-known that the “best” parents don’t always produce the best progeny. This is true in all kinds of breeding: orchids, dogs, cats, horses, and let’s not forget humans. A few examples come to mind…

Price: $100

Some of you may not know this, but there were many, many ‘Rex’ x ‘MM’ progeny grown up from flask, and while they’ve become hard to find these days, I saw a number of them here and there the last few years. These were primarily the runty ones, slow and difficult to grow, that had finally reached maturity — years after their more vigorous sibs had already bloomed (maybe several times). I fully expect the same situation to happen with this generation of OZ roths. So if you’d like to get the strong, vigorous growers from this new crop of roths, now would be a good time…

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What do you do when your orchid leaves are flaccid, limp, and just not performing?  How do you get those erect, stiff leaves full of turgor and vigor?

On many occasions I’ve acquired plants or somehow ended up with plants that have a central leaf that just won’t stand at full attention.  I had one particularly large P. rothschildianum ‘Green Valley’ x ‘Fly Eagle’ with lovely thick, wide leaves.  The plant grew well, but at one point the big central leaf just flopped over.  Watering more frequently just didn’t seem to help, despite a pot full of healthy roots (1).

Having grown under lights like the pot growers, I had already experimented with every possible humidifying system you might come across:

Ultrasonic humidifiers:  These are usually cheaply built, with an ultrasonic element that breaks quickly.

Ultrasonic misters:  These are the ultrasonic piezos from the above humidifiers, and they have identical shortcomings.  You can get them in arrays or six elements that can pump put a copious amount of fine fog, but they require a lot of power, and the power supplies are very low quality.  One of them almost started an electrical fire in my home as I was testing it.

Warm steam humidifier:  these have the advantage of warming your plant area, but by the same token, they have the problem of warming your plants when you want it to be cool.  Good for use in the winter if you want to keep plants warm and provide humidity.

Gravel trays:  Heh…  I’m somewhat unconvinced that these work.  Here’s why: When molecules of water evaporate from the surface area of the gravel, they will disperse into the overwhelmingly greater volume of air that is not already humidified.  Hence, the amount of actual humidified air around your plants is quite low especially if your room is large compared to the size of your gravel tray.  How much actually reaches your plants and has an effect is questionable.  If your plants are sitting in water in a gravel tray and thriving, I wouldn’t exactly assign the success of said growth to the gravel trays, but to semihydroponic growth (and a plant that has adjusted well to it).  Nevertheless, if gravel trays work for you, keep it up.

Cooling misters:  These are the plastic tubes with fine nozzles that you get at Home Depot and hook up to a garden hose spigot.  They claim to produce a mist that can reduce the ambient temp by something like twenty degrees (which only works if you’re in the hot desert and dropping 20 degrees gets you down to a balmy 90 deg F).  The problem is that the mist produced is not as fine as you might think, and actually ends up splattering droplets all over your leaves coalesce into big drops that then run into the crown of your plants, forming a lovely cesspool for erwinia and other pathogens to grow and infect your plant.

So, what is going to get those limp leaves up?

I use, and love, The Hydrofogger (2).  This thing pumps out a super fine, atomized mist like nothing I have ever seen.  It works on a different principle than any of the above.  A centrifugal mechanism inside throws water out onto some other thingamajig that results in the finest, loveliest, most ethereal angel mist you can imagine.

If you can use one of these babies in an enclosed space like a small 15′ x 15′ greenhouse and jack it up to full capacity, you will have an area completely packed with fog.  I’ve gotten the fog so thick that I literally could not see more than a few inches in front of my face.

So how did my limp roth do?  Well, I subjected it to a few days of 90%+ relative humidity, and that limp leaf just rose and became erect as if I had fed the plant a bottle of Viagra (not that I have any personal experience or need of such pharmaceuticals).

Other plants that didn’t have limp leaf problems also seemed much happier, too.

Please keep in mind that the other part of this equation is having an enclosed space that can hold the humidity at the required level.  (So if you’re growing on a patio, you may want to try hang some plastic sheeting around your plants to keep the humidity high)  Venting the humidity from time to time, and keeping strong air movement flowing over your plants will help to prevent other opportunistic pathogens from getting a foothold.

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(1) So why doesn’t simply watering the plant more work better?  There is probably a limit to the amount of water that can be pumped through a plant’s vasculature system from the roots.  Increasing the availability of water in the air allows the molecules of water to be absorbed through the leaves and possibly reach areas not reached as efficiently by the plant’s vasculature.

(2) Call the Hydrofogger phone number at 1-866-77-HUMID, and ask to speak with Mr. Thomas.  He will take good care of you.  Full Disclosure: I was so pleased with the results, I told Mr. Thomas I’d mention Hydrofogger on this blog, and he kindly agreed to give me a commission on any sales originating from my referral.  I’d like to pass on the generosity — if you get a Hydrofogger, you can receive $25 off of your next order with us at Paphiness Orchids.

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The ‘Charles E.’ clone of P. rothschildianum is certainly a very influential plant in paph circles, and the ‘Borneo’ clone equally so. Both received FCCs and produced many progeny which themselves won numerous AOS awards. All well and good.

Every year, though, I get inquiries about these plants from excited collectors new to slipper orchids. New “pouch people” getting into roths are often dazzled by the awards given to ‘Charles E.’ and ‘Borneo’. What they don’t realize is how outdated those awards are, having been given thirty years ago. Now, I am not knocking the plants themselves — they are fine rothschildianums (and I’m proud to own both). But it’s sort of like flipping through old Playboy magazines from the 60’s — if you grew up in a era of silicone “perfection,” you’re astonished at how times and tastes have changed.

So where is a collector (of rothschildianums, not Playboys) to start?

I believe the current standard in roths is still ‘Rex’ FCC/AOS x ‘Mont Millais’ FCC/AOS produced by the Orchid Zone. One can easily and fairly argue, however, that the ‘Val’ FCC/AOS x ‘Mont Millais’ FCC/AOS cross from the Tokyo Orchid Nursery is the best. Well, as always, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and when it comes to orchids, in the hands of the grower.

Progeny from both of these crosses has been the foundation of much of the current breeding in roths. The Orchid Zone has been continuing to push roth breeding by selecting the best of their ‘Rex’ x ‘MM’ plants, and crossing with progeny from ‘Nan Chou’ (a very dark roth) x ‘MM’ and other crosses. I have been fortunate to acquire a number of seedlings of this cutting edge breeding; if you are interested, please email me.

Many of the crosses coming from Asia these days actually bring both (Rex x MM) and (Val x MM) progeny together. (Actually, ‘Val’ FCC/AOS was one of the progeny of the ‘Charles E.’ x ‘Borneo’ cross.) In other cases, select plants have been outcrossed to plants originally wild-collected.

All of this genetic mixing and matching should produce some really spectacular stuff. So the future looks very exciting for roth nuts.

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P. rothschildianum is known to exist in only two locations on Mount Kinabalu on the island of Borneo. There was a third location, but that locale was reportedly destroyed in a forest fire (cf. Cribb). The two remaining spots are in a national park, and hence protected from poaching (supposedly).

Mount Kinabalu

Whether other locations exist is unclear. I’ve heard stories of smuggling, or read accounts of disappearance of plants once found in certain locations. I suspect that there are other places on Borneo where roths still grow in nature, hopefully unbeknownst to collectors. Another reason I believe wild plants do grow outside of the known locations is a chapter on P. sanderianum in Orchid Fever, the excellent book by Eric Hansen. His eyewitness account (if accurate) certainly belies the notion that sanderianums are endangered, and if that’s true, then I’d suspect that other pockets of rothschildianums exist as well.

In any case, P. rothschildianum is not a species I’m worried will disappear from the planet anytime soon. There are probably far more roths in cultivation than in nature at its undisturbed peak, as breeders have been breeding with roths for 40 years.

Unlike some orchids, roth breeding is still not far removed from wild-collected plants. For example, ‘Rex’ FCC/AOS and ‘Mont Millais’ FCC/AOS both were originally wild-collected, as were ‘Borneo’ FCC/AOS and ‘Charles E.’ FCC/AOS. And I’m sure there are other plants originally, and legally, obtained from the wild pre-CITES that flourish in private collections all over the world. So if breeders were to breed their plants from the wild with each other, we should be able to re-create at least a small pool of the genetic potential of wild rothschildianums.

My proposal is simple: scatter rothschildianum seed on places on Mount Kinabalu where roths were known to grow or are likely to grow well. Then let nature do its work. After all, this is already what happens in nature. We’re just giving it a helping hand.

OK, some objections:

1) Bred plants won’t survive in the wild. Many, if not most, man-made inter-species hybrids generations removed from nature probably would not thrive in the wild. (I have enough trouble keeping fancy-flowered, but weak, line-bred Phalaenopsis plants alive in regular cultivation!) It might be the case that multi-generational breeding produces plants that look pretty, but can no longer survive in the jungle. Progeny from a cross between plants originally from the wild, however, would be just as “wild” as those from nature.

2) Genetic diversity is limited. Well, yes. But genetic diversity of wild plants is already limited to the pool of existing wild plants, whether on Mount Kinabalu, hidden in the recesses of Borneo, or in private collections. The situation won’t improve in nature unless people do something about it.

3) It’ll never work, it’s too political. Unfortunately, this is probably true. The unbelievable tangles of conservation law bureaucracy would likely keep any meaningful efforts from happening. In some instances, the conservation laws produce such gridlock that practically ensure the very plants the laws were designed to save get covered over under asphalt or golf courses. So in order for this to fly, some kind of reverse smuggling operation would need to happen.

In any case, it’s easy enough to make roth seed, and store it (some orchid seeds have been known to germinate after many decades!). If growers involved in the project simply made crosses between clones of their plants known to have come from the wild, after a few years’ time, I think there’d be a nice pile of seed that could be spread about by some modern-day Johnny Appleseed.

This sort of effort is exactly analogous to those conservation efforts you see on Animal Planet TV, where a dedicated group of people try to train lions/tigers/bears or wolves or elephants or monkeys — born in captivity — with the skills needed for survival in the original habitat. Those efforts must cost immensely more than my modest proposal. And you don’t even have to train any plants in my scheme. The seeds will have no memory or handicap from having been produced in “captivity”.

In the jungles of Borneo, they will simply do what rothschildianum seeds have always done…

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Baron Ferdinand James von Rothschild (1839 - 1898) was a member of the famous Rothschild family, known for their financial empire stretching across Europe. Born into the Austrian branch of the family, he settled in England, where he married his first cousin, Evelina, who tragically died with their baby during childbirth. Baron Rothschild built a hospital in her memory.

Besides becoming a member of the British Parliament, he was an art collector, and, of course, a famous orchid collector. He built an estate called Waddeson Manor, where he kept a vast collection of plants. And, he had the great distinction of having the King of Slipper Orchids named for him. I read somewhere that a Baron Rothschild had a plant with 200 leaves and put up a dozen flower spikes! That would be a spectacular sight to see. (Better yet, I hope to grow a rothschildianum that big myself.)

It’s not clear to me yet which Baron Rothschild owned this massive roth, as I haven’t seen the original reference, and there have been a lot of Rothschilds, several associated with orchids. A Continental cousin of Ferdinand, Edmond, had a huge collection in Paris. Bulbophyllum (or is it Cirrhopetalum now?) rothschildianum appears to have been named for a Walter Rothschild. At least one of the wealthy modern day Rothschilds continues the tradition in France. Maybe collecting orchids runs in the family, along with great wealth and art collecting.

Or does it mean that collecting orchids will make you rich? You can find out for yourself by clicking here and choosing a nice plant to add to your collection.

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