venustum alba or aurea?

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I am not well versed in the naming arena, but that’s mighty yellow and mighty beautiful.

Greetings from Paris, by the way, where it’s 10 am, but still 4 am EDT to me
 
Ozpah is right: Botanically speaking, the albinistic colour form of P. venustum is validly published as Paphiopedilum venustum fma. measuresianum (named after a victorian orchid grower, mr. Measures - actually, there were two of the kind and I'm not at the present in the clear about which of them it was).

To parafrase myself: Botanists tend these days not to ascribe varietal status to plants that morphologically (structurally) do not differ from the typical form, but only have a different colouring. These are instead treated as colour forms (abbr. fma), which, I think, makes a lot of sense.

To call the albinistic form of P. venustum 'album' is botanically nonsense - album means (pure) white (as f.ex. seen in bellatulum fma. album or niveum ditto), see f.ex. Gruß or Braem for a thorough discussion of this matter. If you, nevertheless, insist, you could put a (Hort.) behind the name, signifying that the name is a horticultural one, and not a botanically legit one - in this case: P. venustum fma. album (Hort.).

Some botanists haven't made life easier for the rest of us by designating plants as album, that clearly aren't, but as Braem and his co- authors point out: "The rules of taxonomy ... lack proper safety mechanisms against the misuse of the designation "alba/album/albus". A designation of a species or an intraspecific taxon, as long as it is part of a validly and effectively published concept, is to be followed, no matter how erroneous or ludicrous the designation may be". The authors mention P. haynaldianum fma. album, a plant with mainly green flowers, as an example of this (Braem et al.: "The Genus Paphiopedilum. 2nd Edition", p. 44. Bishen Singh Mahendra Pal Singh, 2016).
 
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Ozpah is right: Botanically speaking, the albinistic colour form of P. venustum is validly published as Paphiopedilum venustum fma. measuresianum (named after a victorian orchid grower, mr. Measures - actually, there were two of the kind and I'm not at the present in the clear about which of them it was).

To parafrase myself: Botanists tend these days not to ascribe varietal status to plants that morphologically (structurally) do not differ from the typical form, but only have a different colouring. These are instead treated as colour forms (abbr. fma), which, I think, makes a lot of sense.

To call the albinistic form of P. venustum 'album' is botanically nonsense - album means (pure) white (as f.ex. seen in bellatulum fma. album or niveum ditto), see f.ex. Gruß or Braem for a thorough discussion of this matter. If you, nevertheless, insist, you could put a (Hort.) behind the name, signifying that the name is a horticultural one, and not a botanically legit one - in this case: P. venustum fma. album (Hort.).

Some botanists haven't made life easier for the rest of us by designating plants as album, that clearly aren't, but as Braem and his co- authors point out: "The rules of taxonomy ... lack proper safety mechanisms against the misuse of the designation "alba/album/albus". A designation of a species or an intraspecific taxon, as long as it is part of a validly and effectively published concept, is to be followed, no matter how erroneous or ludicrous the designation may be". The authors mention P. haynaldianum fma. album, a plant with mainly green flowers, as an example of this (Braem et al.: "The Genus Paphiopedilum. 2nd Edition", p. 44. Bishen Singh Mahendra Pal Singh, 2016).
Yes I would basically agree with all this. ''fma would be the correct term. Speaking of Braem, I notice that many articles including pics of alba forms in Schlechteriana (including Braem's) use the term ''var'' for the alba forms - at least during the 1990's!
 

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