Pollination myth or fact?

[King_of_orchid_growing:)]

@ The Orchid Boy:

I found the answer to your original question in a rather unexpected way...

I have a 2 volume set of books written by Dr. Joseph P. Arditti called Micropropagation of Orchids (second edition), and I happened to leaf through it this morning because I was having trouble sleeping and I got bored.

Guess what...

On page 655 of volume I, there is a section that discusses a rather unusual intergeneric cross between Doritis pulcherrima and Kingiella philippinensis in which the intergeneric name is called Doriella.

Well - our good Hawaiian friend W. W. Goodale Moir was mentioned as the one who was responsible for this intergeneric cross.

In the first paragraph of page 655, in volume I of Micropropagation of Orchids (second edition), Dr. Joseph P. Arditti states, (I boldfaced the sections of the paragraph that was the most pertinent and underlined certain words and phrases that should emphasize the point of the paragraph):

"W. W. Goodale Moir was an orchid breeder in Hawaii who had a penchant for indiscriminately cross pollinating orchids across generic and species lines. As a result he produced many hybrids, a number of them involving more than one genus. To explain his successes, he formulated unusual, unscientific and silly theories, one of them being that phases of the moon somehow affected fruit set in orchids. In fact the reason for his successes was simply the exceedingly large number of crosses he made. It was inevitable that some of his innumerable crosses would produce interesting hybrids..."

So to answer your question directly this time, with no bs, the true answer to your original question is that the whole moon phase thing is a complete myth and it should not be believed one bit.

End of discussion, hopefully once and for all!!!


Btw, I came across this rather accidentally. I actually wanted to find out whether or not orchids in the genus Huntleya had a set of protocols for being cloned. I couldn't find any protocols for cloning Huntleya, so I leafed through the section talking about Disa, then Diuris. Right after the section talking about how to clone Diuris, I found page 655 that talks about the intergeneric cross, Doriella - the hybrid W. W. Goodale Moir made.