Ansellia africana propagation success?
 

I'm considering crossing a couple of my Ansellia africana plants that are currently in bloom. Having never attempted crossing any orchids before, if anyone has had success with propagating this species from seed (all the way from the cross pollination stage to harvesting the seed), I would like to hear about your experience--both positive and negative. What went wrong--and what went right?

It is probably fairly straightforward to harvest a green pod and ship it off to one of the companies that offer flasking services. Is there any benefit in attempting to do this at home, provided you have the necessary equipment and use proper technique? I have looked at the propagation category on orchidboard's site, but many of the "how to propagate orchids at home" articles contain dead links. If anyone knows of one that is current, please let me know.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Steve

Don’t have an answer for you but am curious about which varieties you have. I have “garden party” which is all yellow.

I would make a few pods, send some out To a lab and try a few in your own.

Hi, James. Here are flower photos of the two plants being crossed. Thank you for your reply to my post.

Steve

smweaver, this seems like a very nice project! I don't think flasking this species would be so different from flasking most other orchid species; once you have a good medium, the biggest concern would probably be sterilization. A fellow member, Afid, has had success with medium from this ebay seller. Afid has previously offered to do some flasking for people on the forum; I'm not sure if he's still doing it, but he can definitely answer your questions. :)

Thank you, Neophyte. I'll have a look at that Ebay seller's products later today. I have access to an autoclave, so sterilization is actually not as much of a major concern as it might otherwise be. I am just not sure how successful I will be. Of course, I could hedge my bet, in a manner of speaking, by trying to sow my own seed and also sending an additional pod to a lab. It sounded kind of fun to attempt to raise babies from seed.

Nice looking flowers!

Here’s a picture of mine. So much variety in the colors with these.

That's a very clean-looking yellow, James. I'm so used to seeing flowers with varying degrees of spots and blotches that it's a little startling to see an ansellia bloom with much of that brown and black coloration either completely absent or (since I can't see your flower close enough to tell) reduced to the point where any speckling is almost unnoticeable.

Very nice flowers on your variety--although I'll assume it's just as mildly stinky as the blooms on mine.

Steve

Wow, let me know when you want to sell a flask or a community pot! Looks like it'll be a great cross!

---------- Post added at 05:49 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:47 PM ----------

You know there's a red version now too!

Steve, curious if this is just an experiment to see if you can do it and what will happen or is there something particular you are trying to achieve with this cross?

Keysguy, I'm interested in getting something that's nearly saturated with the dark (black or brown, doesn't really matter) splotches. The more refined looking one (the one with the more rounded segments) came from Cal Orchid. According to the label it's a cross of Primero and (I think--hard to tell as the ink has worn off over the years) Mont Millais.

Jim Rose (of Cal Orchid) wrote an article in the Orchids bulletin many years ago--something like either the late 90's or early 2000's--about Ansellia africana. It's actually what got me interested in trying to grow this species. In his article, there were pictures of a number of clones from South Africa. I no longer have the magazine this article was featured in, but I do remember--and you can find similar photos online--that some of the plants from South Africa produced stunning flowers, much darker than anything I've seen over here. So it's something along those lines that I would like to see if it's possible to achieve.

In addition to these two ansellias, I have a third that's in flower, but the blooms are much lighter in color.