Rth. Princess Su-Lyn - Seedling flower variation
 

It never ceases to amaze me how much variation there can be in a seedling population.

In Nov 2019, I took advantage of Fred Clarke customer appreciation sale (and purchased too much). In that order, there were:

Rth. Princess Su-Lyn
4 x SVO7022 = (Slc. Tokyo Life 'Dec. 1st.' x Pot. Telling Lies 'SVO')
4 x SVO7023 = (Pot. Telling Lies 'SVO' x Slc. Tokyo Life 'Dec. 1st.' )

I have just bloomed the last of the SVO7023, but have yet to see any of the SVO7022. Here are the 4 flowers, in the sequence that they opened:

True. This is one of those things that makes orchids capture attention. So many significantly different results can come from a cross.

I recently found out that in some non-orchid plants such as day lilies, siblings can have different names completely - they are sold as different plants if they don't look the same, whereas orchid siblings an look completely different but having the same parents have the same name.

I'm not sure what the best system is.

From some perspectives I favor the Day Lily approach:

1. In order to differentiate between significantly different plants).
2. In order to distinguish between plants produced by tipo parents, versus coerulea, flavum or rubra parents, etc.

However, from a practical (= numbers) perspective, we have to stay with the current approach - impractical as it may be in the day-to-day orchid life:

One day lily flower sets a seed pod with at most two dozen seeds. When you bloom the seedlings out, you might get 0-3 plants worth propagating (typical ratio is under 10%).

One Cattleya flower sets a seed pod, which can produce up to 500,000 seeds. It is common to produce several hundred seedlings, so the plant numbers are on an entirely different order of magnitude.

My wish is for a registry of clonal names, so we can get a better handle on individual plant IDs. I have suggested this to the AOS (could be organized as an income producer), but they never responded or acted on the suggestion.

A clonal registry is a great idea.

Two of our OS members have occasionally brought in the results of the crosses they have made and I am always fascinated to see the variety that results. I really like the fourth one. It is so different from the siblings but still has that touch of yellow and red in the lip. Pretty cool.