species or hybrids

[SlipperGirl]

Originally Posted by JanS

From the discussion it seems like most of us don't really care whether we have species or hybrids, as long as we like the flower result. I guess I am one of that majority...up to a point, though.

As orchids have become ever more popular among the mass population in the past 10 or so years - in the USA primarily driven by their cheap availability in big chain stores like Home Depot and Lowes - it seems there is ever-increasing pressure on commercial growers to come up with "improved" plant characteristics that appeal to the public and hence sell more plants. I see this the most with Phals. Bigger and bigger flowers to the point that the stalk has to be supported by multiple stakes since the plant itself could never support its own flowers - akin to growing "Butterball" turkey hybrids that can hardly walk on their own. And since Mother Nature cannot give us a blue Phal, even with advanced hybridization, people figured out recently to inject dye into the growing flower stem to get blue streaks in the flowers.

All this kind of cheapens the whole genus to me. Growing up in central Europe, one of the reasons I got into growing orchids was their tropical, jungle mysticism of lands I once hoped to visit. Some (not all!) of the hybridization trends of orchids these days seem to be greatly veering away from that exciting part of growing an orchid...

Well said.