what’s the deal here?

[tmoney]

ok, so reading a thread i learned that paphs don’t take to tissue cloning and that they are mostly cloned by division. so then of course i went to google and found this link

EDIT....it won’t let me paste the link! weird....but it is snow tiger legacy paph from paph paradise (if you want to see the plant in question)

and then started wondering why this particular plant was so expensive? also, they say something about rare pink breeding, but i could swear i see pink all over when i look at paphs for sale? maybe not? so, what’s the deal? is a plant like this really worth that much, and what makes it better for breeding pink than any other pink paph i have seen?

just all for learning sake, so thanks for any replies!

[Mr.Fakename]

Paph are very recalcitrant to tissue culture, but it can be made.

However, the procedures that work on them are very specific, and are destructive.

When you want to clone an elite Phal, you can snip a spike off, and get your plantlets without damaging the mother plant.
You'll often see "meristem propagated" on select clones, which is what is achieved by cloning a Phal from its spike.

Meristems from Paph are different, in the sense thay they're directly exposed and not protected by some kind of sheath, and you have to extract them directly on the core of the plant; which means killing it, and at the risk of frying the explant if the sterilisation procedure fails.

If you manage to get the meristem, the next challenge is finding the appropriate culture media for that specific plant. Paph don't to the typical run off the mill media.
And at last, plantlets grow very slow.

There are recent methods that work, with limited success, to clone them.
It is possible to use leaf tips or ovaries as explants; but the problem is that plantlets produced with those parts are often mutated and don't look/grow 100% accurate to the mother plant.


This is why you'll see elite cultivars offered as divisions and not clones. You get the real deal, and the grower doesn't have to sacrifice their prized plants for a clone that is likely to yield no results.

[Ray]

Why don't you email Dave?

My guess is that pink genes might be recessive in such complex breeding, and that the particular parentage might have them reinforced - but that's all it is, a guess.

The description on the website says it's a division, not a clone.

[Fairorchids]

When you grow Cattleyas (or Phalaenopsis, Cymbidium, etc.) from seed, you get a very large number of seeds from each pod.

In the Cattleya group, all species have the same number of chromosomes, so breeding is easy. Some Cattleya pods have been estimated to hold 3 million plus seeds!

The quality of the seed grown plants varies a great deal. Some crosses produce 80% good/20% junk, others only 1 or 2 plants worth keeping.

When you meristem propagate a Cattleya, you can make 10,000+ copies of the original plant. The clones grow relatively fast, and are true to the mother plant. If you use tissue from a clone (or a clone of a clone), you risk that some mutations start to occur. However, average unit production cost for all good plants is low.

Paphs are different in many respects:

1. In this genus, the number of chromosomes varies. That makes seed production difficult. While some plants are fertile breeders, many are not. It is not uncommon to hear of crosses producing less than 10 seedlings.

2. Plants grow relatively slow, with some multi-florals taking up to 16 years to reach blooming size.

3. As Mr.Fakename explained, meristem propagation is risky, difficult and often with inconsistent results.

This leaves us with traditional natural divisions.
A few plants grow quickly and set multiple new growths. Such plants can produce multiple divisions in a few years.
Others only produce one new growth every 12-18 months. Once such a plant has 4-5 growths, you can separate the two older growths to force it to start a new plant. You only get one division every 4-5 years.

With the limited Paphiopedilum production, select breeding plants have always had much higher prices than other orchids. The price level seems to have come down a little, 10 years ago the most sought after breeders were priced in $3,500-5,000 range.

[tmoney]

hey folks, thanks for the detailed info! i didn’t realize how finicky the paphs are until just now....so it does make sense. and please don’t get me wrong, i am not complaining about plant prices (the market is the market), i just wanted to know more about these difficulties. i guess these plants are geared/sold to breeders and not just your average windowsill grower!

oh, and ray i do appreciate your suggestion about emailing, but i am a nobody in the orchid world and certainly don’t want to be the guy perceived to be emailing and complaining about prices!! you being you i would imagine you would receive better feedback from such an inquiry

[SouthPark]

Originally Posted by tmoney

EDIT....it won’t let me paste the link! weird....but it is snow tiger legacy paph from paph paradise (if you want to see the plant in question)

Just trying to paste the link here too ---- link.

No way I'd pay 1200 dollars. That amounts to a lot of McDonald's burgers ----- we call it 'maccas' here.

Although - we do know about eye-of-beholder. So some people probably would pay that.

[tmoney]

Originally Posted by SouthPark

Just trying to paste the link here too ---- link.

No way I'd pay 1200 dollars. That amounts to a lot of McDonald's burgers ----- we call it 'maccas' here.

Although - we do know about eye-of-beholder. So some people probably would pay that.

ha! yeah, that’s a lotta burgers, for sure....

and yeah, i can absolutely see someone buying these plants, and we all know orchids have sold for a lot more!

like im still trying to find some history on why our most expensive orchid (nowhere near this much) cost what it cost. i don’t mind paying a little for some backstory, in fact it is worth that money. but man, there better be a lot of backstory for some of the prices i see. the breeding issues at least make sense

[estación seca]

Go back and read about when the orchid craze started. The Duke of Devonshire spent the 2010 equivalent of a million dollars on glass for his greenhouse. He decided a single electric light for one special plant in the winter was too expensive.

[Ray]

The most expensive orchid I’ve ever seen or heard of was back in the late ‘70s/early’80s - a mature, wild-collected blue Phal violacea and one immature one we’re offered to me and others for $30000 or $35000 (I don’t recall, exactly). Those two plants - the entire wild population - are the ancestors of just about every blue phal in the market today.

I have no idea who bought them or what they paid, but it was a good investment.

[SouthPark]

I know what Ray means. But just adding this link hehehehe