What's in a name?
 

I'm a very beginner orchid enthusiast and previously had only gotten orchids from grocery stores. I'm looking to expand my collection and branch out to other Genus than Phalaenopsis. When I'm looking at orchids from breeders (is that the right term?), there are so many names!! For instance, this is a name of a Cattleya from SVO:

SVO 7958t
C. Gaudii (C. leopoldii f. coerulea 'Kathleen' JC/AOS x C. loddigesii f. coerulea 'Blue Sky' AM/AOS)

How does one interpret this? I keep seeing the terms "grex" and "cultivar" being thrown around, but I don't know what these mean.

There will be other comments who can explain this better with regard to the words grex and cultivar.

As I understand this....

C. Gaudii is the given name to that particular plant, whether its a registered name isn't specified.
The names in brackets are the parents with the initials after each name are the awards given to the parent plants.

Thanks for the response! I’m a little confused too about the two scientific names for each parent - C. leopoldii f. coerulea 'Kathleen' JC/AOS - are C. leopoldii and f. coerulea two of the grandparents of the plant?

https://staugorchidsociety.org/PDF/U...ySueBottom.pdf

certainly im no expert, but that link helped me when we first started looking at names.

As I understand it, grex refers to the parentage of a hybrid. Cultivar refers to a particular clone/strain that people have named.

In your example,

C. Gaudii (C. leopoldii f. coerulea 'Kathleen' JC/AOS x C. loddigesii f. coerulea 'Blue Sky' AM/AOS)

The hybrid is Named Cattleya (C.) Gaudii and the grex (the parentage) is given in parenthesis. The cultivar names of the parents are given in quotes. This particular hybrid, C. Gaudii, was made by crossing two select parents, Cattleya leopoldii and Cattleya loddigesii which were both apprently named and awarded cultivars. The JC/AOS and AM/AOS refers to the awards the plants have received.

Some species have variation of color and or pattern on the flowers that are a bit different than what's considered "typical". These are sometimes indicated by f. (forma) or var. (variety). There are scientific distinctions on those but I'm not a taxonomist, so I will leave that alone. In your example, the parents are both f. coerulea, or a lavendar/blue-violet like color variation of the species.

The AOS website has a nice introduction here:

Basics of Orchid Names


For me, it is nice to google for a photo of the hybrid - or if the hybrid is not very common, looking at the parents and imagining what the offspring (hybrid) might look like.

google, facebook, and orchidroots.com are a great resource for browsing!

The word "grex" is derived from the Latin word for "flock", and is used to designate the result of a cross. In this case, the grex name is Gaudii.

Awesome! Thank you everyone, this makes a lot more sense than what I was making up in my head. 😂

The American Orchid Society[URL="http://www.aos.org"]http://www.aos.org[/URL ] has a good read on Basis of Orchid Names in their All About Orchids section.

Do you think it’s helpful to have a membership to AOS when starting out?

Yes - there is a lot of good information in Orchids, the monthly magazine, and also on the website (some of which is in the Members Only area) Not a lot of money (the price of maybe 2-3 plants), a good investment.

---------- Post added at 11:43 AM ---------- Previous post was at 11:29 AM ----------

As you get seriously hooked on orchids, you'll want to get down into the weeds to learn more about them. The named hybrids (like C. Gaudii) are registered with the Royal Horticultural Society in the UK, the "master database" - the entire pedigree of the plant can then be traced back to the species that went into it. And knowledge about the habitat in which the species grew can give you information about how to grow the hybrid. orchidroots.com is a very good place to look up the parentage of a hybrid, and here's one more valuable reference... orchidspecies.com (Internet Orchid Photo Encyclopedia) with information about the species.

A hint in interpreting names... hybrids (human-made) have the grex name capitalized. Species are lower-case. So (assuming that they are labeled correctly) you can tell the difference upfront.

For example: C Gaudii is a hybrid of two species, C. loddigesii x C. tigrina . If you look up the habitats of the two species, you will find that both parents are fairly cold-tolerant (down to 40 deg F/4 deg C or thereabouts, though you might have to fudge a bit...) That information tells me that I can grow the species, and the hybrid, in my southern California backyard. Your conditions, of course, are different... but that's idea, knowledge is power!