Not always beauty knocks at your door!!!

[Rosim_in_BR]

I love adding seedlings to my collection. It is rewarding in several ways: there's the challenge of leading the small plant to maturity, the excitement of the first flower, but most of all you can, and most likely will, end up with something different, something that only you have (in opposition to mericloned plants!), a plant with characteristic not easily found and so on. Of course, there's always the opposite risk, the risk of getting crippled plants, which cannot produce not even normal flowers.
Most of times we show the success and hide the failures, but I cannot save myself from this, because, at best, a poor flower shows my inability of correctly assess the parents involved, but even if I had done it right, there's always the imponderable! After all we're dealing with living beings and there's room for good variations as well as to bad ones.
Take a look at the Cattleyas bellow. I bought them as small seedlings. The first is a cross between a flamea and a broad petal clone. My expectation was to get flowers with broad and splashed petals. And that was the breeder's intention too! Well, the second photo shows it all! The flowers not even open (I have a second plant with the same characteristic).
Coincidence or not, the alba came from the same nursery. It is a peloric alba that simply refuses to open too!
Of course I am not complaining, this is part of the game and could not be any different. I just wanted to post these two examples to show that sometimes beauty does not knock at your door and this is normal!