Paphiopedilum gratrixianum

[Rick]

I like Risk's comment "There is such a huge amount of variation (and inter-relatedness) in gratrixianum and villosum. But if this is a large flower I would consider it more of a villosum variety instead of a gratrixianum."

My gratrixianum somehow looks like a villosum at least its pounch and petal

I recently gave a presentation put together by Averyanov on slippers of Indochina (centered on Vietnam).

There are a couple of slides that show myriad forms of villosum/gratrixianum like flowers. Every new mountain and valley he goes to from Saigon to Hanoi has a different form. He labeled them as "clinal variants", with a continuous gradual shift in forms from one part of the country to another in a South to North transect. He also did an East to West transect starting in Thailand, Myanmar through Laos to Vietnam. That transect started out with inigne/exul like forms gradually morphing into more "gratrixianum" like plants.


One thing I've not been able to get from photos but in my GH looking at actually flowers is the size differences. My exul, insigne, and "gratrixianum/affine" flowers are very small in comparison to the villosum I have. The villosum is 2X the size of these other flowers. I don't know if my villosum is abnormally large, but it would take a whole different pollinator to deal with it compared to the other species, and pollination isolation is what makes a species. If you have two flowers that have the same color/pattern, but greatly different in size, that changes the pollination dynamics and subsequent genetic isolation.


Without knowing the collection site of this plant it could be virtually impossible to ascribe a definitive identity.

Not all dark haired brown eyed Caucasians are Italians! (even if they want to be:wink

 

[vinhpicohp]

I recently gave a presentation put together by Averyanov on slippers of Indochina (centered on Vietnam).

There are a couple of slides that show myriad forms of villosum/gratrixianum like flowers. Every new mountain and valley he goes to from Saigon to Hanoi has a different form. He labeled them as "clinal variants", with a continuous gradual shift in forms from one part of the country to another in a South to North transect. He also did an East to West transect starting in Thailand, Myanmar through Laos to Vietnam. That transect started out with inigne/exul like forms gradually morphing into more "gratrixianum" like plants.


One thing I've not been able to get from photos but in my GH looking at actually flowers is the size differences. My exul, insigne, and "gratrixianum/affine" flowers are very small in comparison to the villosum I have. The villosum is 2X the size of these other flowers. I don't know if my villosum is abnormally large, but it would take a whole different pollinator to deal with it compared to the other species, and pollination isolation is what makes a species. If you have two flowers that have the same color/pattern, but greatly different in size, that changes the pollination dynamics and subsequent genetic isolation.


Without knowing the collection site of this plant it could be virtually impossible to ascribe a definitive identity.

Not all dark haired brown eyed Caucasians are Italians! (even if they want to be:wink

Many thanks for your kind inf.:clap:

 

[Rick]

Many thanks for your kind inf.:clap:

You're welcome.

I would love to make this presentation available to ST members since I think it would go a long ways in these discussions, but it is a 63MB Power Point presentation, and I don't know how to move it around (other than making copies on CD and mailing them). This presentation was donated for distribution to the Mid America Orchid Congress, and I'm not sure if I could legally copy and send it all over without their permission.

Some of this info on species variation can be found in Averyanov's book The Slipper Orchids of Vietnam. But this presentation has much more new info added.

 

[chrismende]

Wow, Rick, I would certainly love to have a copy of that presentation! Would you make an effort to see if you may distribute to interested Orchid Societies?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Ozpaph]

if you have Dropbox it could be uploaded to 'the cloud' and then you could post a link.

 

[Trithor]

Interesting flower. The dorsal has an unusual crystaline white quality when it first opened, but perhaps more interesting are the markings in the petals.