Importing orchids?

[PNGPhil]

I live in Papua New Guinea and my main experience with orchids is mounting and growing on local orchids that folk here sell at market (mainly dendrobiums and diplocaulobiums, as in my gallery).

I'd love to be able to grow some more 'exotic' blooms here - the climate should work - eg. cymbidiums, oncidiums or phalaenopsis. However, to do this I'd need to import them, and that starts getting difficult.

I don't expect anyone has any experience importing to PNG - but if you do, please let me know!

Alternatively, a friend at the National Agricultural Research Institute says you can only ever import anything into the country that is in the form of 'tissue culture', but I don't know what this means.

Could I buy orchids as tissue culture to import? And if I did so, what would be needed to turn them into normal plants?

Thanks for any help!
Phil

[Mevv]

not 100% positive since I'm new to orchid growing but tissue culture just sound like a fancy way of saying you need to import orchids as seedlings in a flask. usualy flasked orchids can get around alot of the importing regulations because they are contained within a jar.

best of luck.

[lambelkip]

tissue culture means mericlones in flask. seedlings in a flask would not be allowed.

[Ray]

Originally Posted by lambelkip

tissue culture means mericlones in flask. seedlings in a flask would not be allowed.

That's an awfully narrow interpretation - especially when you haven't spoken directly to the originator of the statement. I suspect that the implication is that by being in-vitro, issues such as CITES and phytosanitation essentially vanish.

Besides, if you had a flask of small plants originating from seed, and another originating from meristematic tissue, you would not be able to tell them apart.