Awards from the Strongsville Show

Slippertalk Orchid Forum

Help Support Slippertalk Orchid Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
Joined
Nov 14, 2022
Messages
1,046
Reaction score
781
Yesterday marked my last show on the schedule for the first half of 2023.
We had a very good turnout of judges and we broke up into 3 teams. We looked at 14 plants.
My team granted two awards, one went to a Paphiopedilum hirsutissimum. Hirsutissimum has 109 awards world wide. I don’t have my figures in front of me but I think the award total is 51 from the AOS.
Our candidate had three flowers of good form and pretty good color. The top edge of the petals are ribbon like and just adds to the beauty of the species. The dark central green center of the dorsal sepal along with a deeper rose pink petal tip makes this species one of my favorites all time.
This cultivar was granted an 80 point AM. Enjoy my slipper friends!!570738E1-130F-463E-9C8A-5854512721F4.jpeg
 
Now here is one that caused my team yesterday to have quite a friendly discussion. This is Cattleya Pink Diamond.
2F617CFB-5750-4EA2-8FD0-83C13C9B6A1C.jpeg
This flower was about 15% larger then the one previous award. The award is not important. Form and color were really nice in my opinion. I think that my cellphone captured it fairly accurately. It is kind of a rich “watermelon” color. It is not Cardinal red or cherry red. There is an obvious pinkish or raspberry tone to it. The plant was a real attention grabber as it sat down low, dead center, in a tabletop display in Strongsville.
I thought a low AM as soon as I saw it as I passed by with my ribbon team. So sure enough, it comes to my AOS team and things sounded great in the beginning. It is Cattleya Orpetii x Cattleya wittigiana.
But what lead to its downfall was the mere mention on my team that they felt that this little beauty was a mericlone of the only previous award to the grex. Well, that could be true certainly. Then my other team members really started to pick it apart I thought, maybe too much. It was passed, no award.
in one of my previous posts we talked about Phal. Formosa BlackBerry. Could it have been a mericlone? Well we ended up with the same discussion. Mericlone or not, I would love to own it!!!
What does everyone think?
Enjoy my friends.
 
Last edited:
The prior award was barely a year ago, the chance of this plant being a mericlone is basically zero. I'd be pretty unhappy if I took the time to go to judging and my AM quality plant was passed over because the judges thought a Cattleya could be cloned and flowered in 13 months.
 
The prior award was barely a year ago, the chance of this plant being a mericlone is basically zero. I'd be pretty unhappy if I took the time to go to judging and my AM quality plant was passed over because the judges thought a Cattleya could be cloned and flowered in 13 months.
 
Once that notion of a clone gets in their heads, it can be impossible to shake them off of that idea. You can use logic. You can try common sense. But it was hard for me not to push it by nominating it.
I could see the scores, me at say 82, them at 73 and 72. We are out of range. I am not going down from 82 to 78 to put it in the 6 point range. At 78, 73 and 72 for 223 points divided by three takes us to a 74.33 average and no Award. It needs 74.5 or better. It would be a shame to give an AM flower a 75 point HCC.
 
It is a beautiful flower indeed and looks similar to the one awarded.

However, there are a few questions here:

First, how do we know it was mericloned? Was there a public list that proves this? Eg. from SVO sale list.
Second, other than the one in OP, was there others that were seen in other collections/shows that looked the exact same?

If the answer was negative to the above questions, it stands by logic that it may not be a MC.

It's surprising that a phal MC was awarded and this one Cattleya wasn't lol.
 
The prior award was barely a year ago, the chance of this plant being a mericlone is basically zero. I'd be pretty unhappy if I took the time to go to judging and my AM quality plant was passed over because the judges thought a Cattleya could be cloned and flowered in 13 months.
That would depend where both of the plants come from... I know of a few cases where it is very possible that both instances were the same mericlone supplied to the hobby trade.

In a funny twist, 3 of the largest Phalaenopsis commercial pot plant suppliers came up with a couple varieties since a few years, like that. They went to Taiwan to buy 'seedlings in flower' and get PBR/use that variety as exclusive.

At an Hortifair, and the subsequent IPM, they looked funny with their new 'color variety bred by them'... All had the same plant! Turns out the Taiwanese told them it was a seedling, where they were mericlones...
 
That would depend where both of the plants come from... I know of a few cases where it is very possible that both instances were the same mericlone supplied to the hobby trade.

In a funny twist, 3 of the largest Phalaenopsis commercial pot plant suppliers came up with a couple varieties since a few years, like that. They went to Taiwan to buy 'seedlings in flower' and get PBR/use that variety as exclusive.

At an Hortifair, and the subsequent IPM, they looked funny with their new 'color variety bred by them'... All had the same plant! Turns out the Taiwanese told them it was a seedling, where they were mericlones...


But the odds of that having happened with an oddball Sophronitis hybrid are pretty slim. It's a flimsy justification for screening an awardable plant, especially after they just awarded a grocery store Phal.
 
Last edited:
But the odds of that having happened with an oddball Sophronitis hybrid are pretty slim. It's a flimsy justification for screening an awardable plant, especially after they just awarded a grocery store Phal.
It looks like it in that case indeed... The grocery store Phal was as well not of awardable quality by any standard...
 
For arguments sake - just because the first award was 13 months ago doesnt mean it wasnt a 5-7 year old plant cloned on the first flowering a few years earlier.

And how likely is it that someone selected an award quality plant from a seedling batch, had it cloned, never had it judged, and two of that plant were submitted 13 months apart? What kind of sense does it make for a grower to leave money on the table by not having a plant awarded before sale?

Especially knowing that the same judges just awarded a grocery store Phal it sounds to me like there was some kind of personal bias at play here.
 
And how likely is it that someone selected an award quality plant from a seedling batch, had it cloned, never had it judged, and two of that plant were submitted 13 months apart? What kind of sense does it make for a grower to leave money on the table by not having a plant awarded before sale?

Especially knowing that the same judges just awarded a grocery store Phal it sounds to me like there was some kind of personal bias at play here.

Fully agree with you. I am posting in the Phalaenopsis thread, about the A22 grade grocery phal...

This said, that's why I never submitted plants for awards, and will never do... That's why too in Taiwan a lot of the top breeders put 'no AOS awards' in the TIOS show as well. At a point unfortunately an award is not a guarantee of quality anymore.

Look at the

Paphiopedilum rothschildianum 'Max & Best' FCC | AOS (91 points) March 2020

It was soo bad and there were so many complains that apparently they had to rescind this one, though there are award photos on Facebook still of it.

If the AOS wants to survive in terms of awards, the judges must be more knowledgeable, and have more experience than some clusterfuck of awards I see out of some judging centers.
 
That's the grocery store Phal:

https://www.slippertalk.com/threads/phal-formosa-blackberry.55017/#post-748381
I pointed out 2 fatal flaws that should prevent any award from being given to any Phalaenopsis in general... Those were commonly enforced in the 90s back when I visited some Judging centers in California... First, fatal flaws, second what's wrong with the flower, then judging.... Apparently we are at a point score level, and if it makes a total, and if compared with previous awards, better on 1 or 2 points, let's give the award today...
 
I'm fortunate to be in range of a great center with fair and knowledgeable judges, if I had to deal with the politics, personal squabbles, and silliness I see people talk about in some other centers I'd probably be disinclined to exhibit my plants too.
 
That's the grocery store Phal:

https://www.slippertalk.com/threads/phal-formosa-blackberry.55017/#post-748381
I pointed out 2 fatal flaws that should prevent any award from being given to any Phalaenopsis in general... Those were commonly enforced in the 90s back when I visited some Judging centers in California... First, fatal flaws, second what's wrong with the flower, then judging.... Apparently we are at a point score level, and if it makes a total, and if compared with previous awards, better on 1 or 2 points, let's give the award today...

Even setting aside the flaws for a moment, just the fact that they would award this plant that is 100% a mericlone while passing another with the justification that it might possibly be a secret mericlone of a plant awarded 13 months ago is a bad look.
 
Yesterday marked my last show on the schedule for the first half of 2023.
We had a very good turnout of judges and we broke up into 3 teams. We looked at 14 plants.
My team granted two awards, one went to a Paphiopedilum hirsutissimum. Hirsutissimum has 109 awards world wide. I don’t have my figures in front of me but I think the award total is 51 from the AOS.
Our candidate had three flowers of good form and pretty good color. The top edge of the petals are ribbon like and just adds to the beauty of the species. The dark central green center of the dorsal sepal along with a deeper rose pink petal tip makes this species one of my favorites all time.
This cultivar was granted an 80 point AM. Enjoy my slipper friends!!View attachment 39918
Very fat laterals.
 

Latest posts

Back
Top