That's absolutely beautiful

Here's a good webpage to get you started: Walkeriana: Raizes de cattleya walkeriana

Oh sick okay that makes sense yeah! I'll keep an eye out once I have some fresh root tips so I can see what the color looks like, since any visible root tips right now got a bit calloused from shipping, and don't seem to ever have been exposed to enough light for the plant to have generated local anthocyanins anyway.


That definitely clears up some of my confusion around the spotting too! The poster suggests that coerulea pigmentation on different vegetative structures can be on a spectrum from a deep wine color that's maybe slightly more grayish/less saturated than tipo plants, to grey-cast greens, all the way to a clear lime green as though it were an alba plant. It actually got me extra curious to see how another orchid of mine eventually blooms, since I have a cork-mounted C. intermedia v. aquinii f. coerulea that's definitely expressed some greyish/wineish pigments in the root tips.


Also, I'm dying to know: how did you know I spoke Portuguese? I actually happen to be from Brazil, but I didn't think I'd mentioned that anywhere on here yet!

I think that looking at this as something on a spectrum is right on the money. There's probably not a hard and fast rule to know whether a bloom will be coerulea but rather to suspect if it'll be. Blooming will be the confirmation factor.

I think what's important to know about spotting, is that coerulea forms don't tend to spot, or spot less, so they might get burnt more easily if the light is too high, that's my biggest takeaway for culture. Also, it's sort of known that the first bloom of coerulea cattleyas is terrible, so don't get discouraged if the first one kinda sucks :biggrin: It'll get better with time. Keep us posted!

Its the internet, so I can find out EVERYTHING about you!!! BWAHAHAHAHAH!

jk

It's just an odd coincidence! There really isn't anything else online that I know of describing the root tip phenomenon in any detail, which is odd considering how useful that knowledge is. Roy Tokunaga tipped me off to this info many years ago when I lived in Honolulu and used to visit H&R Nurseries every time they dropped a new list. I've been picking my Cattleyas based on root tip color ever since and have gotten pretty good at picking seedlings with cool colors. I think I talk about it in this video where I intentionally picked a rubra and alba walkeriana as a seedling and got to see the results for the first time: https://youtu.be/thL13pAg9n0?si=I1gnqoyUzXGUBYgF

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That sounds right. But with some practice, you can get pretty good at it!