Cattleya guatemalensis
 

I bought this little beauty at the Green Fest in Tampa on Saturday. But, I'm a bit confused...I thought it was a species given the lower case g, but OrchidWiz has it listed as Guarianthe x guatemalensis ??

Laura, Guarianthe (Cattleya) xguatemalensis is the natural hybrid between Guarianthe skinerii and Guarianthe aurantica... since it is a natural hybrids, it is written in lower case, but the "x" indicates it is a hybrid.

BTW, yours has a very nice color! :)

beautiful!!

Beautiful indeed!

very nice !

Awesome, I love natural hybrids.

Wow, great colors! Like Royal, I too love natural hybrids!

Nice strong color. Don

Wow, what vendor did you buy it from? I was at the greenfest too, but I never saw this plant.

Maybe by the time I got there, you had already bought it lol. :biggrin:

I bought it from Phelp's and they had a smaller one and a larger one that day. I know that they will be coming to the TBOS show this weekend. are you going to that ? If so, you could call and ask them to bring one for you!

True, if it is a wild collected plant or bred from wild collected natural hybrid plant(s).

But if a deliberate cross was made between the 2 species then Guatemalensis, upper case G, no x.

Ohhhh, the plot thickens!! :lol:

I have this one as well, same label - first bloom for me on this one. My flowers look different from yours. I entered mine in a show in Feb an was advised that because it is a naturally occuring hybrid the plant could be entered in the species category. Found that interesting, not sure if correct technically however.

Our flowers do look different.
Yours are very nice also!

hooboy there was a looooot of backcrossing to the skinneri side there, n'est-ce pas?

-Cj

Or an alba aurantiaca was used. :hmm

"alba" aurantiacas are almost always suspected of actually being guatemalensis, anyway.

Beyond that, colour and shape are very skinneri. I have a guatemalensis that is pretty clearly heavily backcrossed to the aurantiaca...


Regard:

It's gorgeous.

I find all this stuff about natural hybrids and backcrossing really interesting.

Have I gathered correctly that a backcrossing of a hybrid with one of it's parents is still considered to be the same hybrid name... that could lead to even wider variation in a cross that you would get just from a single mix of the two parents... I had not realised that before.

Well, only in natural hybrids. What develops in nature is called a hybrid swarm, where you have he two parent species at either extreme of the variability and potentially any variation between them. You get crosses back to either parent pretty readily and sometimes it can be for so many generations that it's almost impossible to tell where the species end and the hybrids begin.

In cultivation, though, backcrosses are considered new hybrids.

-Cj

Thanks Cj, good to know.

So what happens if a natural hybrid is crossed with one of it's parents in cultivation rather than in the wild, does it then become a new hybrid or does it stay the same :hmm

As was said above a cross between skinerii and aurantica made in cultivation gets a capital letter as a hybrid, so do crosses of guatemalensis (the natural version) and one of the parent species stay as Guatemalensis or get called something else...

... it's a coplex business isn't it ;)

Oh you're welcome. Read up on orchid introgression online. Fascinating stuff.

Then you are dealing with a new hybrid. Gur. x guatemalensis x Gur. skinneri = Gur. Tristan Fitch

x Gur aurantiaca = Herbert Oesterreich

-Cj

Thanks again CJ.

I will definately read up some more on this (easier to find stuff now I know the word introgression).