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Part of the allure of slipper orchids is all the gossip, rumors, and stories swirling about.

Here’s what I heard over the slipper orchid grapevine regarding P. tigrinum albas.  (This is a third-hand account, so take it for what it’s worth.  And if you’re one of the parties involved in this affair, and I’ve made a mistake, please let me know and I’ll make any necessary corrections.)

As everyone tigrinum devotee knows, this species is a highly sought after paph, partly because of its relative rarity, and partly because of its beautiful, single flower.  Its color resembles lowii, and its spotted/stripe-like spotting patterns on the dorsal from which the species gets its name is unique among paphs.  Yet there is something about the flower, some ineffable quality that transcends the other unifloral paph species.  It is a flower that is easily more than the sum of its parts.

Obviously, an albinistic form of this species would be an extremely desirable find for that super-rarefied group of alba slipper collectors.  “Collectors” is probably the wrong word, actually.  “Fanatic” would be a more apt term.

Some years ago, a multi-growth plant was discovered in the wild in China.  This plant made its way to a “botanical center” in China.  Whether one can properly term such a facility in the hinterlands of China a bona fide research botanical center or not remains sketchy.  Given the penchant for flowery language/boasting in China, I would not be surprised if it was just some guy with a garden.  In any case, the Chinese guy who had the plant put out the word on the find, and the news made its way to a well-known European grower.  He and a friend traveled to China to see the plant in bloom.

It was the genuine article, a true alba tigrinum.

The “curator” of the botanical center demanded $5000 USD per growth, and a deal for $10,000 was consummated.  At this point, the details get even more murky.   Here’s my best conjecture: The acquired growths were then grown, and possibly further divided.  At least two growths eventually found their way to the United States, and likely the original mother plant ended up in Taiwan, where the appetite for such rarities is immense.

At a Paph Guild meeting (the slipper orchid conference held in California every year in January) in 2007 or 2008 which I attended, a vendor from Taiwan brought flasks with selfings of tigrinum alba.  They only had six plants per bottle, and the price was $800 per flask.

Now, tigrinum is not the easiest species to grow from flask.  In fact, it’s quite difficult, and as best as I can ascertain and from my own sorry experience, about 75% of seedlings from flask will never make it to maturity, dying off in the first year or two.  I passed on the alba flask, but I saw at least one guy who got one.

I don’t know what became of those seedlings, but I suppose in a situation like this, knowing the odds are stacked against you, the bet is that one plant will survive and be worth much more than the cost of the original flask (and the worry lines on your face as you try to grow the plants up).  Not a bad bet, actually, especially if you end up with a vigorous grower that you can divide in a few years, and command top dollar from other collectors.

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In a previous post (It’s tough to be a slipper orchid breeder), I enumerated many of the difficulties in breeding orchids.  After depressing myself writing that post, I’ve hit upon an obvious-in-retrospect observation that will enable the home grower to compete on a level field with the big guys.

As I said previously, quality breeding takes a long time and costs a lot in terms of stud plants and growing space.  Can’t do much about time: it works the same for everyone.  Stud plants?  Well, you might be able to get some pollen from top plants and put it on a very nice specimen of your own.  It’s not too hard to find stud plants; what is hard is finding stud plants of high-demand species or hybrids.  For example, anyone can do a top P. fowliei cross — but who cares?  Nevertheless, if you try/beg/steal, you can find some nice genetics to work with.

The growing space aspect is really where the professionals have an advantage.  In order to select the best plants of a cross, you need to grow up a large number to find really good ones.  Of course, a large crop of plants requires a lot of space.

But there is one group of orchids where you can beat the breeders: brachys (OK, parvis, too).

Brachypetalums, such as niveum, leucochilum, concolor, and bellatulum, are all small plants that produce wonderfully charming flowers.  You can easily grow a plant to blooming size in a 2-inch square pot.

Now, assume that 2% of a species cross will produce a plant clearly superior to its parents, and the rest will equal their parents or look like dogs.  Well, if you bloom out 100 plants, you can expect two superior plants on average.

It is not that difficult for the home grower to grow up 100 brachy seedlings.  Let’s do the math…

Area required for 100 plants

Assume:

4 sq. inches per pot.

100 plants

So: 4 x 100 = 400 sq. inches = 2.8 sq. ft.

That’s about the same area as four 8.5″ x 11″ pieces of paper, easily within the range of a growing shelf in a modest grow area.

So, if you grew up and bloomed 200 or even 300 plants bred from top parents, you’d very likely find some absolutely stellar specimens.

You can easily do this by obtaining flasks of high-quality plants.

So, to address each point on my previous list:

1) Start with parents of excellent potential, preferably from several different crosses

CHECK.  Getting flasks of plants bred from high-quality parents is quite straightforward if you know where to look (e.g., right here).

2) Grow the plants big enough to carry a seed capsule.

CHECK.  The grower of the flask has already done that!

3) When the plants flower, do the crosses (and enough crosses to cover a 50% non-fertilization rate).

CHECK.  The grower of the flask has already done that!

4) Hope that your plants carry seed capsules to maturity.

CHECK. The flask you have is already proof that this step was successful.

5) Hope for germination.

CHECK. Same as above.

6) Make flasks from germinated plants.

Uh, CHECK again! Same as above.

7) Grow and flower at least 100 from each cross.

OK, this is where your growing efforts come in!  You’ve been able to bypass steps one through six, and now, you can compete on a fairly even footing with professional breeders.

Well, you might ask, “Why couldn’t the breeders just bloom out more?”  The answer is they could, and small-time breeders would get crushed.

But the reality is that the pros won’t do that.  They need to devote time and effort to growing other stuff to sell, and are not likely to put all their eggs in one basket because of changing fashions and fads in the flower market.  So the very scale and market requirements of the professional nurseries enables amateurs the opportunity to produce some really nice stuff!

If you’re interested in taking the plunge, check out these fantastic leucochilum flasks.  These crosses are sure to produce many new winners!

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Breeding slippers seems easy.  After all, if an insect can do it, certainly you ought to be able to, right?

Of course, a breeder is going to select parents with desirable traits to pass on to progeny, in the elusive quest to produce a “superior” plant.  The process for getting these superior plants is pretty straightforward, no mysteries here.  In fact, you can choose from two different alternatives: A) Make or B) Buy.  Most people make life simple, and choose “B”.

Some people, usually egotistical and misguided, select “A” (like me).  They think they can do the job better than a bug.  Well, here’s what you have to go through:

How to Make an Orchid with Prize-Winning Potential

1) Start with a bunch of parents with excellent potential, preferably ones that could win prizes (if you’re into garnering prizes) and do a number of crosses.  Keep in mind that just because you have two parents is absolutely NO GUARANTEE that you will get a successful seed capsule from crossing them.  So, you’ll need a few different parents.  Six potential parents is a good number.  Let’s assume you already have those plants today.  [Total time elapsed: 0 years]

2) Grow these plants so that they’re strong and can handle carrying a seed capsule or two.  (This process could take a few years right here.)  We’ll generously assume this only takes one year. [Time required: 1 year]

3) When they’ve flowered, do your crosses, but remember that even top breeders only expect 50% of crosses to produce a seed capsule.

4) Once it looks like some of your plants have mated successfully, you can begin the next step: hope.  You can start hoping that your plants will pollinate successfully and carry their seed capsules to maturity.  Expect about 50% of your seed capsules to abort.  [Time required: 0.5 years (probably longer, though)]

5) Of the seed capsules that DO make it, you can germinate onto agar either yourself or through a flasking service.  Then you can start hoping again, since not all your seed capsules will germinate (i.e., result in actual plants).  Expect again that 50% of your seed capsules result in little or no germination.  [Time required: 0.5 years]

6) Hopefully, you’ll get some germination and can then make some flasks with baby plants! [Time required: 1 year]

7) To see some really good flowers, grow and flower at least 100 from each cross.  Be sure you have enough greenhouse space (and money to keep it running).  You can expect ~2 - 3% to have flowers that are better than the parents.  And remember that some of your crop will flower the year after the first bunch blooms.  [Time required: 3 years (that’s an average, depends on species)]

So your total time elapsed if you were to choose the “Make” option is 6 years, on average.  You could drop step 2 and save a year, but you might run the risk of losing some good stud plants.

The above analysis, of course, doesn’t count the costs of actually doing all that work, and it is not insignificant.  I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out their own costs for greenhouse space, supplies, flasking, time, and effort which will vary depending on locale.  If you live in Thailand (or parts of Hawaii) bordering the jungle, you probably only need to spend money on flasking, as the jungle will handle everything else for you quite nicely.  If you live in Michigan, your costs will be higher.

(In case you missed it, there’s already a built-in problem with the “Make” option in Step 1: Where do you get the stud plants in the first place?  Isn’t that just the same as the “Buy” option?)

Slipper orchid breeding is a long, hard slog.  But a very satisfying one!

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What really bugs me are orchid ads I see claiming that such and such species are rare, when in fact, they are very, very common. For example, I recently saw a P. delenatii in bloom listed as a “rare” orchid. Nothing could be further from the truth. P. delenatii has got to be one of the most common orchids available commercially. Now, the alba form might have been considered rare a few years ago, but these days, it is at best “not often seen”. You can get fine examples of this form from many excellent growers (yes, we have a few at Paphiness Orchids).

There is a variant of P. delenatii that is indeed what I would call “rare”. The var. dunkel (meaning “dark” in German) has leaves with very heavy pigmentation, and the edges are dark purple, nearly black. But sooner or later, they will not be rare as breeders produce more and more of them.

In a future posting, I’ll go through what plants are truly rare.

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At the WOC, some friends of mine exhibited a cattleya hybrid, Pot. Hey Song ‘Tian Mu’. It ended up winning a couple of best-of-breed type prizes. My friend showed me the winning plant; it was a lovely deep red, almost maroon, color. I asked him how much it cost. His answer: $100 for the prize-winning specimen, and $30 for identical clones. I was astounded at the price of this big champion — not at how pricey it was, but how inexpensive!

Now, if you were to walk a few feet away to look at the Krull-Smith exhibit, you would find individual specimens of P. rothschildianum, or P. lowii, or various multifloral hybrids in all their glory. Each of these plants would easily start at $2000. Some could probably fetch $4000 or more.

So why are slipper orchids so expensive?

In a word: cloning. Or rather, the inability to clone them at commercial scale (at this point).

The laboratory research required to discover how to clone paphs is still somewhat rudimentary. Cloning of Paphs has been done in the laboratory, and there have been isolated cases where a protocorm (a mass of undifferentiated but genetically identical plant cells) continues to spawn off new plantlets, but there don’t appear to be any large-scale commercial efforts going on.

When I first got into orchids, I sure did think about it, though. A lot. I read up a bunch of scientific papers by labs (mostly in Taiwan) that had done some research in the field. For the most part, the research was done on hybrids, not species, and but there seemed to me some issues with experimental design and interpretation.

In any case, in genera that can be easily cloned (e.g., Phalaenopsis, Cattleya) you can have hundreds of thousands of plants from a single test tube. That’s why a top plant with exceptional characteristics can be brought to mass market easily, quickly, and cheaply.

Doesn’t work that way with Paphs and Phrags, though. In addition to the difficulty of cloning them, they just grow so slow! So even if you could clone them, you’d have to expend a certain amount to grow them to size and the cost to carry them to bloom may not be recoverable at the market price of the plants. After all, in the fickle potted plant market, who knows what a non-orchid buyer would pay for a plant?

It all goes to reinforce the old orchid growers’ saying: “How do you make a million bucks in orchids? Start with two million.”

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One of the wonders of the horticultural world is the flower auction at Aalsmeer in Holland. Over 4 billion plants are sold each year in a massive, mechanized, concrete complex covering the area of 250 football fields! Auction lots of flowers from Africa and Israel (and many other places) are brought to Aalsmeer where buyers can bid on them as they come up for sale. Besides the astonishing logistical efficiency that moves auctioned flowers from Holland to North America in less than 24 hours is the famous bidding clock. A large clock counts down from 100 — as the time drops, so does the price. The first buyer to bid sets the price and can take the whole batch. Once a flower lot has been sold, it is set on a plane or train and shipped to its destination market.

Here are a couple of videos depicting this fascinating process.

In this first video, you can see the clock in action. It’s fast!

In this second video, you can see the many machines and trucks :

Utterly amazing.

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