Oh! the name MU somehow jumps out
The hangianums with a lot of red on the dorsal & petals in the Slipperorchid of Taiwan IV, are they hybrids?
The dandelions statement is so funny, didn't Leonid say they are on the verge of being critical threaten near the end of the book?
Maybe I remember it wrongly.
Well, MU or many others, they have a "trend" in Thailand to rename quickly seedlings to suit the customers as well. I had a lot of disappointement buying unbloomed plants and flasks. Sometimes the cheap flask on Jatujak market would yield nicer and real leucochilum than the 150$ flasks.
The hangianum in Slipper Orchid of Taiwan are real ones, but they are not very common at all. In fact, they are quite rare, not like an albino, but not very far. I would say that randomly out of 1000 hangianum blooming, maybe 20 will be red, and 10 with nice shape.
About Leonid and the 'verge of being critical threaten', that's the main problem in Paphiopedilum. The scientist have to rely on the professionnal collectors to get informations about the locations. The businessmen are clever, and they bring them to specific localities with a couple of plants, enough to make the scientist happy, and to have a 'critical treathened' on a book or a paper. It helps to raise the price.
In Hanoi, the collector that was all the time in contact with Leonid has copies of some parts of his papers and books, with the 'near extinct', 'critically endangered' and others. Whenever someone comes to his nursery, he has big boxes of all of those 'extinct' species, show a copy of the paper, and push the customer to buy much much, because 'maybe it is the last time, you see the scientist know it is extinct, but I can supply boxes'. That's it...
Frankly, I think two things:
- Paphs are very far from being extinct. In fact, most species are quite common in the right places. All the Chinese/Vietnamese species are available by many, many boxes, except now coccineum
- The pot-plant trade, their main market, will make them extinct quite soon. The supplies cannot last that much.
- They are much faster growing in the wild than in cultivation, for many species. I have seen hangianum first bloom from the wild, they had 2x5 cm leaves, 1-2 12-15 cm leaves, and 1-2 20-25 cm leaves, pristine condition. Not many 'mature roots', quite a few like we find in the flasked seedlings. My guess is that those plants were not more than 2 years old. Maybe the fungus or bacterias around the roots supply something to the orchids that we are lacking in culture, normally. Maybe an amino acid, maybe something else.
Anyway, those plants had no lichen on the leaves, and in the wild most old plants of hangianum have plenty of lichen on the leaves, impossible to remove.
There were many stories of 'jungle vigor', where plants freshly collected grow like crazy, and progressively slow down. I think it might be related.
Really borderline extinct is coccineum. gratrixianum var. daoense is out of reach now.
Plants with some colonies but not too much available because of high price is vietnamense ( price raised after many people mentionned it is 'extinct').
All the remaining is available anywhere, anytime here. Even delenatii are still sold by the kilo in Da Lat, fresh collected plants.
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