Organizing and classifying a collection.
 

How do people organize duplicate plants in their collection?

I'm trying to keep a log of my plants, including when they bloom or when they start shooting roots. But even the same hybrid and cultivar may act differently.

I have a bunch of Phalaenopsis White Dream 'V3' and started to tag them Phal. White Dream 'V3' - A, Phal. White Dream 'V3' - B, and so on.

If I didn't label them, I wouldn't remember which survived Erwinia, which had a great bloom, or which had a bad reaction to neem oil.

How do people keep their plants organized when they have several duplicates?

-1, -2, -3, etc., starting with the largest plant.

Did you go for numbers because there weren't enough letters in the alphabet? I've heard that's a common experience among orchid growers.

hmmm, perhaps looking into typical inventory schemes would be helpful. there are some varying methods that follow simple patterns. probly tho not super useful unless you have thousands of units from various distributors. for us, we simply add our own short descriptors to the tags, like “dark” or “small”. these labels are added to the inventory notes. how inventory is taken varies by type of business and scale, afaiu.

You can give them your own names if you want to!

As a sidenote I would be a little cautious about trying to define differences between clones and divisions. Personally I would tend to assume that every deviation is a cultural or circumstantial effect.

I give every plant a unique number. Then the database has number, genus, grex or name . To record anything about a particular plant, I just jump to that number in the database (number on tag) and it is very quick to match particular info to particular plant. If I make a division, the new division gets its own number. Your database (using whatever tool you're comfortable with) can of course have other details about each plant. (Where and when you got it, how much you paid, species vs hybrid, when it bloomed, when potted, etc.) But it is that unique number that lets this work for both small collections and large. A lot easier to set up when collection is small, of course.

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I also use those numbers to keep track of photos, naming the files with the number. Photos have letter after the number. So plant 203 may have photos 203a, 203b, 203c, etc.

I don't have very many duplicates yet, so I just give them nicknames. One of my phals bloomed this year in a shape reminiscent of a sailing ship. It is now the HMS Phalaenopsis.

Paphiopedilums will have "deviation" because they do not grow from clones (meristem clones), which cause all plants to be "the same plant" except for cultural deviations (as you said). Even in "the wild" different populations have a variety of qualities-- some being more (or less) aesthetic to the eye of the collector. This certainly does have much to do with what chemistry is affecting the plants, (what culture), but also the parent populations. Norman Fang tells a good story about why older Ho Chi Minh paphiopedilums are inferior to new ones, and it has to do with the continuous selfing of a limited number of plants (while the populations were more or less off limits because of war in that region), while the "better" are from more recently collected, and hardier plants. Like that cat, the Cheetah, the populations get so small that the limited biodiversity creates mutants which may not be as "strong" as populations with a large diverse gene pool.

So anyway, if they are seed grown, definitely give them numbers, (or letters, which ever).

Optimist, of course I am aware of the existence and importance of genetic diversity but example that Mateo gave was two of his plants which are the same clone, or perhaps a division.

Wow, seems like folks are much more organized than I am! I've never kept track of my plants in any format outside of my head. I guess the closest thing to keeping track of my plants comes in the form of an excel file showing which plants I've tested for virus, which is only a small portion of my collection.