As beautiful as mine! I think these are parents of the future. What do you think? Mine and yours?
I think they are Brunos................................only DNA testing will sort these out.
I don’t want to denigrate or upset anyone and there is room for all opinion and aesthetic preference but here’s mine: P. spicerianum has a folded turret dorsal. That characteristic substantially acounts for its grace and exotic charm, Losing that characteristic, whether through hybridization or line breeding, seems unfortunate. The relentless drive to make all these flowers into flat versions of themselves and/or one another makes no sense to me.
I’m impressed by the flat wide flowers for their sake but I wouldn’t grow them or contribute to them. My aesthetic preference is to see and steward what I could stumble upon in the jungle. The plant as evolved over countless millennia is perfect to me and what I want to see and grow. These big wide waxy spicerianums look like bulldog paphs to me, like spicerianums on steroids. Again, room for all and I do appreciate them for what they are in themselves but I run from them as my idea of spicerianum. Why do breeders not focus on amplifying natural features? That classic turret dorsal wouldn’t look any less lovely if it doubled in size along with the rest of the flower, nor the petals less impressive with their waviness increased rather than flattened. To me, hybridizing and line breeding often seems to go exactly the wrong way from where it should. But then, I’m not a breeder. I’m someone who’s after classic jungle plants with a provenance that respects CITES (which I know is another fraught issue and I’m not blind to its tragic shortcomings but having read Orchid Fever and the kovachii debacle I just don’t want that trouble).In the case of spicerianums, there was a big fiasco in US breeding where a hybrid Bruno was introduced into the line breeding by mistake. The progeny was bred as if they were the true species in Asia and Europe. And the results were huge 4N type spicerianum lookalikes. However, Bruno lineage is easier to tell from true spicerianum by its plant growth pattern, staminode and sibling comparison (sibs will not flower consistently like true species, meaning some will look like a complex).
And like Jens mentioned, the reputable growers will know this and will delegate accordingly. If mine was judged as a Bruno, it will most likely get an award before it gets one as a spicerianum. That is a true tragedy then. What happened with Hercules will set a precedence that ALL big and flat spicerianums are hybrids. And this is simply not true. This means that no spicerianums with flat dorsal will ever be recognized by the award system because of that fiasco. Truly sad.
I’m impressed by the flat wide flowers for their sake but I wouldn’t grow them or contribute to them. My aesthetic preference is to see and steward what I could stumble upon in the jungle. The plant as evolved over countless millennia is perfect to me and what I want to see and grow. These big wide waxy spicerianums look like bulldog paphs to me, like spicerianums on steroids. Again, room for all and I do appreciate them for what they are in themselves but I run from them as my idea of spicerianum. Why do breeders not focus on amplifying natural features? That classic turret dorsal wouldn’t look any less lovely if it doubled in size along with the rest of the flower, nor the petals less impressive with their waviness increased rather than flattened. To me, hybridizing and line breeding often seems to go exactly the wrong way from where it should. But then, I’m not a breeder. I’m someone who’s after classic jungle plants with a provenance that respects CITES (which I know is another fraught issue and I’m not blind to its tragic shortcomings but having read Orchid Fever and the kovachii debacle I just don’t want that trouble).
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