Paph hermannii

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myxodex

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I bought this at the London Orchid Show in March 2010. It was an impulsive buy as I wasn't that convinced I liked this species. However with two flowers on it's first blooming and an apparent willingness to clump up, this little plant has charmed me and I think it would look great if grown into a specimen plant.
 
I bought this at the London Orchid Show in March 2010. It was an impulsive buy as I wasn't that convinced I liked this species. However with two flowers on it's first blooming and an apparent willingness to clump up, this little plant has charmed me and I think it would look great if grown into a specimen plant.
That is an excellent specimen of P. hermannii
 
good choice!!

You will enjoy growing it, it makes quickly nice clumps and can bloom twice a year. ;-)
 
I like these. Regardless of the name, Paph hermannii/Paph xhermannii ?

Mick
??? Good question ... I have already (and so has Cribb) stated that it may well be a natural hybrid ... and in that case it should be P. xhermannii of course. But what are the parents???
And anyway, when is a natural hybrid so stable that it is an autonomous species? ... See Braem & Chiron page 127 ...
 
??? Good question ... I have already (and so has Cribb) stated that it may well be a natural hybrid ... and in that case it should be P. xhermannii of course. But what are the parents???
And anyway, when is a natural hybrid so stable that it is an autonomous species? ... See Braem & Chiron page 127 ...

Wouldn't selfing this plant be a way to answer this question? :confused:

If it was a hybrid wouldn't the offspring show a lot of different flowers?
 
That's lovely! It could give a good pink colour to the pouch of it's progeny, possibly without the petal distortion of P. victoria-regina.
 
P. helenae × P. hirsutissimum.

- P . × herrmannii F.Fuchs et H.Reisinger , 1995, Linzer. Biol. Beitr. 27, 2: 1213. Fig. 22, f-I; 26, h.


http://www.spolo.ru/article_002_6.html

I don't know how they came out with herrmanii being a nat hybrid of helenae and hirsutissimum.... The pouch, plant habit and general appearance makes it possibly an hybrid of henryanum ( which of helenae or hirsutissmum has a pink pouch? None).

Maybe Averyanov has seen a natural hybrid of helenae and hirsutissimum, then it is not described. But in his early days, he trusted a lot some traders that were very dishonest, and gave him a lot of false information ( like barbigerum from Lam Dong, or the dendrobium suzukii from Son La :confused:).

Herrmanii has been bought the first time on a street market in Hanoi, as a single plant, by accident. Then a few years later, a complete colony came out of the jungle (like trantuanii), thousands of plants. Then, it disappeared from the trade. However, if nearly all the collected plants of 'trantuanii' ( no matter what they are really) have disappeared, some traders in Dalat still have big, well grown, clumps of herrmanii.


herrmanii comes from about 100km west of Cao Bang, quite close to henryanum. The only colonies known have been collected a long time ago, in massive quantities. Sometimes the collectors bring a few plants, but it is indeed rare. selfings of herrmanii by Klinge gave only herrmanii, no variation, the plant size shows considerable variation, like henryanum.

So far all the plants that were sold as natural hybrids in Vietnam of esquirolei turned out to be very large coccineum, or henryanum, or plain esquirolei. Natural hybrids of esquirolei are exceedingly rare.

A natural hybrid is the progeny of A x B
A natural hybrid swamp, like herrmanii, is AxB, the crosses back to A or B, between them, etc... After some generations, it becomes very constant, and slowly will undergo differentiation as a new 'species' or 'variety'.
 
Wouldn't selfing this plant be a way to answer this question? :confused:

If it was a hybrid wouldn't the offspring show a lot of different flowers?
Not necessarily.
 
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I don't know how they came out with herrmanii being a nat hybrid of helenae and hirsutissimum.... The pouch, plant habit and general appearance makes it possibly an hybrid of henryanum ( which of helenae or hirsutissmum has a pink pouch? None).

Maybe Averyanov has seen a natural hybrid of helenae and hirsutissimum, then it is not described. But in his early days, he trusted a lot some traders that were very dishonest, and gave him a lot of false information ( like barbigerum from Lam Dong, or the dendrobium suzukii from Son La :confused:).

Herrmanii has been bought the first time on a street market in Hanoi, as a single plant, by accident. Then a few years later, a complete colony came out of the jungle (like trantuanii), thousands of plants. Then, it disappeared from the trade. However, if nearly all the collected plants of 'trantuanii' ( no matter what they are really) have disappeared, some traders in Dalat still have big, well grown, clumps of herrmanii.


herrmanii comes from about 100km west of Cao Bang, quite close to henryanum. The only colonies known have been collected a long time ago, in massive quantities. Sometimes the collectors bring a few plants, but it is indeed rare. selfings of herrmanii by Klinge gave only herrmanii, no variation, the plant size shows considerable variation, like henryanum.

So far all the plants that were sold as natural hybrids in Vietnam of esquirolei turned out to be very large coccineum, or henryanum, or plain esquirolei. Natural hybrids of esquirolei are exceedingly rare.

A natural hybrid is the progeny of A x B
A natural hybrid swamp, like herrmanii, is AxB, the crosses back to A or B, between them, etc... After some generations, it becomes very constant, and slowly will undergo differentiation as a new 'species' or 'variety'.
Well yes, that was pure guesswork. And as I (and Chiron) wrote we "suggest" that it is a hybrid between henryanum and a "undiclosed" member of the P. insigne complex. The pouch is clearly pink (cfr. henryanum) and the staminode is typical for the insigne complex. But at the end, we don't know, and that is why we decided to list it as a species. The plant was found in the Botanical Gardens of Linz. So we have no idea where that plant came from, and whether the named species grow sympatrically in an area.
Cribb guesses that P. hermannii is a hybrid between P. barbigerum and P hirsutissimum var. esquirolei ... but does not give any reasons why his guess would be right. The guesswork of the Averyanov group is just as obscrure. Interesting is that Averyanov claims that the plants illustrated in Braem, Baker, and Baker are man-made hybrids is very interesting, because those pictures show plants from the original import, and all the plants I photographed were definitely from the wild.
 

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