"Dendrobium melones" - 30+year misidentification?
 

I recently bought an orchid from the local community college's greenhouse. It was labelled "Dendrobium melones." I looked up this dendrobium melones and only came across a single website on the internet mentioning it by name and that was a 15 year old thread on here from someone at the very same college. It seems to not exist.

Thread here: https://www.orchidboard.com/communit...l-college.html

Does anyone know what this "dendrobium melones" could refer to? Was it made up entirely?

Dendrobium is a huge genus. Similar species are grouped into what botanists call Sections. Your plant looks as though it is in genus Dendrobium, Section Dendrobium, which includes Den. nobile and its hybrids. There are many hybrids between species in this Section.

The Internet Orchid Species Photo Encyclopedia has photos of almost all orchid species. When I went there and looked up Dendrobium Section Dendrobium, the list of species doesn't include any that might be misspelled melones.

There is an online resource called Orchid Roots. It did not exist 15 years ago. You can look up orchid hybrids there. When I went to orchidroots.com and typed in Dendrobium melones, it returned no hits. When I shortened the name to Dendrobium mel, it returned a lot of hybrids with names beginning mel-. Quite a few are between species in section Dendrobium. Have a look there. I suspect your plant is one of those hybrids, perhaps one of the ones correctly spelled melan- .

Could be made up, could be an unregistered hybrid, could be where someone misread an illegible tag "back when". It's capitalized on the tag, so that would indicate a hybrid. Soon you'll have flowers, and at least get some ideas as to what it might be related to.

Thank you for the information. I think melones being capitalized may be an error on whoever wrote the tag's part because in the original 15 year old post where she's transcribing the college's list of orchids from the 90s it is not capitalized. But who knows now. I'll compare to the other dendrobium mel- plants when it flowers and post another pic :)

The old old tag was already in error if written with a lower-case 'm'. I have volunteered with botanical garden collections. Many volunteers misspell tags due to unfamiliarity with plants, unfamiliarity with taxonomy - like, when to capitalize words - and also due to bad penmanship of previous volunteers. Frequently they will only write down what they understand, hoping somebody fixes it later. They may not notice a tag is broken, and part of the name is missing. I would guess that's part of what happened here.

The hybrids listed on orchidroots show their dates of registration. That will help narrow down possibilities.

Ah ha... I did a substring search in Orchidwiz on "ones" and found Dendrobium Malones, registered by Yamamoto in 1973.
OW even has photos... when it blooms, post the photo and I can see if it matches. (Don't want to violate copyrights by posting photos from OW here) Expect pink with lip having white margin and yellow center...

There you go!

Thank you... I'm considering the orchid mystery solved. I'll still post the pictures when it flowers!

Here she is!

It matches the photo on Orchidroots.